A workload survey has one job: to find the tasks that take staff time without enough benefit, so leaders can stop, cut or simplify them. It is most useful when it asks about specific tasks, not only about how busy people feel.
What to ask
Two kinds of question, together:
- How it feels: whether workload is acceptable, and how much control staff have over it. These are the questions you can compare with England.
- Where the time goes: marking, planning, data entry, reports, meetings, emails, duties. Ask which tasks staff would stop, cut or simplify, and why.
The first tells you how big the problem is. The second tells you what to do about it.
Our Workload audit asks about the tasks staff would stop, cut or simplify, in about 5 minutes. It follows the approach of the Department for Education's workload reduction toolkit, now part of its Improve workload and wellbeing for school staff service. For the comparison with England, the Teacher and leader survey with national comparison includes the national workload questions word for word.
How England compares
In the Department for Education's Working lives of teachers and leaders survey, wave 4 (January to May 2025):
- 26.4% of teachers and leaders agree they have an acceptable workload.
- 39.4% agree they have sufficient control over their own workload.
- Asked about their most recent full working week, the most common answer was 50 to 59 hours (33.0%), then 40 to 49 hours (30.9%).
Source: DfE Working lives of teachers and leaders, wave 4 (January to May 2025), teachers and leaders in England. The pages show the figure for primary, secondary and special schools as well.
When to run it
Before next year's calendar is set, so what you learn can change it. January suits many schools: the autumn term's pressure points are fresh, and there is time to plan. Run it again a year later and compare.
Making it count
- Be specific about what will happen next, and when. A workload survey that changes nothing makes the next one less honest.
- Report back on each task staff named: kept, changed or stopped, and why.
- Keep it anonymous: results for a group only when 10 or more staff answered, and no question that identifies someone. See how anonymity works.
For a wider view of how staff are, alongside workload, see how to run a staff wellbeing survey. For every step of running a survey, see how to run a staff survey.
What it costs with Benchmark.Pulse
Running a survey is free, and so is the headline result when it closes. The full report is £149. See pricing.