Can Less be More? Workload and Workload Complexity in English Secondary Schools and their Relationship with Student Attainment and Teacher Retention.
Teacher workload and teacher supply are long standing, interlinked, challenges besetting schools in England. Repeated reforms have sought to ease workload concerns and boost teacher supply, with limited success. There is, however, one outstanding requested reform from secondary teachers. In various guises, teachers have regularly called for increased non-contact time, which directly relates to less scheduled teaching. Whether it is due to perceived cost or implementation difficulties, this call has been repeatedly dismissed or overlooked by policy makers and researchers alike. In response, this thesis presents novel and compelling evidence on the importance of contact hours and workload complexity. By analysing teachers’ contact hours using School Workforce Census data (2010-2016), I demonstrate considerable variation within and between schools and subject departments. Further, panel models exhibit a relationship between workload and school performance, suggesting a benefit to lower contact hours. Secondary teachers’ contact hours and the complexity of their timetables is also associated with actual retention, again using panel data drawn from the School Workforce Census, showing a clear link between timetables and retention. In a separate analysis, I also examine England's lower secondary teachers' responses to the 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey to show that contact hours matter for full-time classroom teachers, particularly in relation to their self-reported workload stress. The issue of scheduled time is also examined from the students’ perspective. Again, using panel models, allocated instruction time is considered for its relationship with attainment. Of practical benefit to schools, those panel models find limited benefit to 'more of the same'. In combination, these findings offer a clear challenge to schools to rethink their use of time. This resonates with the pleas from school improvement practitioners' for additional time, where small ongoing investments in time may yield large benefits to students, teachers, and schools.
Allocated Instruction Time, School Performance, Teacher Contact Hours, Teacher Retention, Teacher Stress, Teacher Workload, Workload Complexity
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