Teacher Workload: 12 Practical Steps for Teachers and School Leaders

You care about your students, so you stay after hours, bring marking home, and agree to extra meetings. But then one day, you find yourself sitting in the car park, unable to face going inside.

Teacher workload in England is at a breaking point. Most teachers feel stressed (76%), not because of anything they’ve done, but because of how the work is set up.

So what can actually help? And how do you know when it’s time to ask for support? In this article, psychologist Britt Slief from OpenUp shares practical steps for teachers, school leaders, and schools to tackle workload before it gets out of hand.

In brief

• 76% of education staff in England are stressed, driven by admin, the teacher shortage, and a lack of autonomy.
• Changes at the school level work almost twice as well as trying to cope on your own when it comes to reducing burnout.
• Start today by making workload a topic in your next staff meeting, and make sure teachers can talk to a psychologist early on.

Why is teacher workload so high?

Most teachers in England feel stressed at work. The Education Support Teacher Well-being Index (2025) puts it at 76%. It is not just one thing causing this. It is a stack of pressures, all building up.

1. Admin takes over. Primary teachers clock up 51 hours a week, secondary teachers 49. Too much of that is swallowed by paperwork. The DfE (2025) found that three out of four teachers say admin eats up their time. Every hour on forms is an hour lost from teaching, planning, or just catching your breath.
2. The shortage makes everything worse. Research from NFER (2025) shows that unfilled vacancies are at 6 per thousand teachers, 6 times the pre-pandemic rate. When colleagues leave, their workload does not. It lands on whoever stays. And since workload is the top reason teachers cite for leaving, the cycle reinforces itself.
3. Classrooms are more complex, but support has not kept up. More pupils need additional support, but there are not enough extra hands. Teachers juggle a wider range of needs, while teaching assistants are stretched thin.
4. Teachers have lost control over their work. Nearly half say their workload is out of hand and they cannot change it. When you cannot shape your own day, stress builds up fast. According to research by Karasek & Theorell, losing autonomy over your work doubles the risk of stress symptoms.
5. Caring comes at a cost. The teachers who stay late and say yes to everything do it because they care.

Psychologist Britt Slief: “Many teachers are deeply committed to their pupils. That is a wonderful quality, but it can also mean they keep shifting their own boundaries just a little further each time.”

6. Meetings crowd out the classroom. Staff meetings, SLT briefings, parents’ evenings, governors, and working groups. Most of this time does not directly help pupils. It breaks up the day and pushes preparation into unpaid hours.

How do you recognise when workload becomes burnout?

Burnout sneaks up on you. It starts with work stress, then sticks around until it turns into exhaustion. Before you know it, you are burned out. According to the Education Support Teacher Well-being Index (2025), 77% of education staff have felt their mental health suffer because of work. More than a third score so low on the well-being index that it points to likely clinical depression.

If you spot the signs early, you have more choices.

• Your body is the first to send up a red flag. You feel tired all the time, even after a full night’s sleep. Headaches show up by Wednesday and do not leave. Your shoulders or neck feel tight when they never used to. A weekend is no longer enough to help you bounce back.
• Your emotions get harder to ignore. Little things bother you more than they should. Maybe a student drops a pencil box, and you snap, even though you would not have before. You wake up already feeling tense about the day ahead.
• Your mind feels slower. Planning a lesson takes twice as long as it used to. You find yourself reading the same email over and over. Simple decisions suddenly feel like hard work.
• You start to pull back. You avoid the staffroom. Meeting friends feels like another job. You keep telling yourself that if you can just make it to the holidays, things will get better.

If you are a school leader, look out for: more sick days, a colleague who used to speak up in meetings but now stays silent, or someone whose work is slipping when it never used to.

Psychologist Britt Slief: “In conversations with teachers, I often hear that they only realise how tired they are when they can no longer recover over the weekend. The energy that used to come naturally is suddenly gone.”

Noticing these signs is the first step. If you are a school leader, the best thing you can do is listen before you try to fix things. Take time to understand what is really going on. Read more about how to identify these signals and what you can do in our article about burnout among teachers.

What works? This approach makes a difference

Changing the system has almost double the effect of focusing on individuals. Research by Guseva Canu (2023) found that organisational changes reduced burnout more than individual strategies such as mindfulness or coaching.

A school that reorganises how work is done will always outperform one that asks teachers to cope.

Six steps that work:

1. Remove admin tasks that do not help teaching. According to research by DfE (2025), 76% of secondary and 72% of primary teachers spend too much time on admin. Check which tasks actually help pupils and which are just done out of habit. Every hour you save goes back to teaching, planning, or recovery.
2. Strengthen the school team. Research by Oberon (2024) found that deploying teaching assistants and specialist teachers had the greatest effect on perceived workload. Distribute tasks that do not necessarily require a qualified teacher.
3. Make workload a regular topic in staff meetings, not an extra meeting. Use a set ten-minute slot to talk openly about how the workload feels. Schools that do this see real progress in reducing burnout.
4. Offer accessible mental health support. According to the Education Support Teacher Well-being Index (2025), 77% of education staff experienced symptoms of poor mental health caused by their work. Do not wait for a sick note. Make help available as soon as the signs appear. OpenUp gives teachers direct, unlimited access to psychologists, available outside school hours and within one working day. Educational institutions across Europe already work with OpenUp to support mental well-being in schools.
5. Review the meeting culture. Much of the time spent in meetings does not contribute to what happens in the classroom. Cut or shorten meetings that have no direct effect on pupils, and give teachers uninterrupted time back.
6. Treat workload as organisational change. You do not reduce workload with a one-off action plan, but with structural changes to how work is organised. According to research by Schelvis (2017), shared responsibility, democratic leadership, and an employee-oriented culture are the three success factors.

What can you do as a teacher?

Big changes do not happen overnight, but that does not mean you have to wait to take care of yourself. Here are six things you can do now to protect your energy and set clear boundaries.

1. Pay attention if your hard work is turning into a routine that leaves you drained. Most teachers go above and beyond what their contract says. The real question is not about caring enough. It is about whether you can keep going like this for another term or another year. If you know you cannot, it is time to make a change.
2. Treat your planning time as carefully as you treat your lessons. Quick chats in the hallway, last-minute cover requests, or parent calls might only take a few minutes each, but together they eat up hours. Try saying, ‘I am in my planning block right now. I can help you at 2 pm.’ That is not being rude. That is being professional.
3. Choose one “no” per week. You cannot do everything well. Pick the task each week that drains the most and either delegate it or drop it. Saying no to one thing protects the quality of everything else.
4. Find out what support your school already offers. Many schools allocate CPD or well-being budget for coaching, counselling or mental health support. Teachers often do not know this exists. Ask HR or your line manager what is available.
5. Recovery begins in the school day. The break between two lessons is not extra preparation time. Living from holiday to holiday is a warning sign, not a strategy. Small moments of recovery throughout the day prevent you from needing the whole weekend just to catch your breath.
6. Talk before you have to. Psychologist Britt Slief: “I often notice that people only reach out when stress has already become too much. Speaking to a coach earlier can help you take small, sustainable steps.” You do not need to be burned out to benefit from a conversation with a psychologist.

When is professional help needed?

If you have been feeling this way for more than two weeks, you do not have to wait for things to get worse. It is a good idea to talk to someone when you notice that life outside of work is getting harder, or when taking a break does not help you feel like yourself again.

Some signs to look out for include having trouble sleeping for weeks at a time. You find yourself feeling negative about your students or your subject. You start to develop physical symptoms that your doctor cannot explain. Or maybe you avoid the staffroom, or you feel a sense of dread about Monday before the weekend is even over.

If you are a school leader, you might notice more people taking short-term sick leave, or several colleagues saying the workload feels too much. You might also feel unsure about how to talk about these issues. These are patterns to pay attention to, not just one-off events.

You do not have to reach a certain level of distress before you can talk to a psychologist. With OpenUp, teachers can speak directly to a psychologist, often within one working day, including evenings and weekends. Most people find their concerns are sorted out after just three sessions. More than 2,000 organisations, including many schools across Europe, already use OpenUp.