ABSTRACT

Surveys have revealed that teachers in England work far longer hours than their international counterparts, causing serious concern amongst both policymakers and the profession. Despite this, surprisingly little is known about the structure of and changes to teachers’ working hours. We address this gap in the evidence base by analysing four different datasets. Working hours remain high: a quarter of teachers work more than 60 hours per week during term time, 40% report that they usually work in the evening and around 10% during the weekend. However, contrary to current narratives, we do not find evidence that average working hours have increased. Indeed, we find no notable change in total hours worked over the last twenty years, no notable change in the incidence of work during evenings and weekends over a fifteen year period and no notable change in time spent on specific tasks over the last five years. The results suggests that policy initiatives have so far failed to reduce teachers’ working hours and that more radical action may need to be taken in order to fix this problem.

摘要

调查显示，英格兰教师的工作时间远长于国际同行，这引起了政策制定者和专业人士的严重关注。尽管如此，令人惊讶的是，人们对教师工作时间的结构和变化知之甚少。我们通过分析四个不同的数据集来解决证据库中的这一差距。工作时间仍然很高：四分之一的教师在学期期间每周工作超过 60 小时，40% 的教师报告他们通常在晚上工作，10% 的教师在周末工作。然而，与当前的叙述相反，我们没有发现平均工作时间增加的证据。事实上，我们发现过去二十年的总工作时间没有显着变化，十五年间晚上和周末的工作发生率没有显着变化，过去五年花在特定任务上的时间没有显着变化。结果表明，迄今为止，政策举措未能减少教师的工作时间，可能需要采取更激进的行动来解决这个问题。