In his latest publication, Glenlead director Vaughan Connolly presents evidence of time poverty among teachers, and relates this to the critical issue of teacher retention.

In 2023, more teachers left the profession than joined and over 30% of England’s qualified teachers quit teaching within their first five years. The large scale of this attrition is a policy failure which harms schools and students.

In this chapter, Connolly offers a novel suggestion. Now is the time to review school timetabling practices, to look for ways to lighten teachers’ schedules and workload.

Past initiatives have been well-intended, but supply problems persist. Thus, it is not enough to only conceptualise workload as ‘unproductive tasks’ – e.g. excessive marking and data handling, intrusive accountability and repetitive planning. Like many sectors considering a four-day week, Connolly urges schools to think more radically.

These suggested reforms are based upon a study of secondary school census data (2010–2016) which shows that teachers can have ‘good’ and ‘bad’ timetables, as measured by structural features of these timetables. When such features are combined with low or high teaching loads then the result is teacher attrition; in certain contexts, the probability of teacher attrition can almost double with a ‘bad’ timetable. For more information, this publication is available from Routledge.