Can Less be More? Workload and Workload Complexity in English Secondary Schools and their Relationship with Student Attainment and Teacher Retention.
type: CreativeWork
description: 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 ongo…
abstract: 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 ongo…
author: Connolly, Vaughan
language: eng
keywords: Allocated Instruction Time, School Performance, Teacher Contact Hours, Teacher Retention, Teacher Stress, Teacher Workload, Workload Complexity
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2022-06-01
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:04Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.90257