Workload, work intensification and time poverty for teachers and school leaders: a systematic research synthesis

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a synthesis of research literature concerned with teachers’ and school leaders’ experiences of workload and work intensification. Forty papers met the inclusion criteria for the research synthesis. From the analysis, we drew out both definitional and experiential accounts. Firstly, while we mostly found a conflation of the concepts of workload and work intensification, there is a distinction between the two that was apparent in some studies. A clear explanation of how they are related is not evident across the suite of studies, although there have been recent attempts to quantitatively interrogate this issue. Secondly, the research indicates that the effects of workload and work intensification negatively impact teachers, in relation to health, wellbeing, and attrition. Further, teachers’ capacity to deliver educational priorities which support the learning of all students is undermined by the experience of a heavy workload and heightened work intensification. The paper advances the notion of “time poverty” to explain how workload and work intensification function together in teachers’ work. Without a clear understanding of the particular affordances and limitations of conceptualisations of workload and work intensification, interventions are unlikely to resolve the contemporary and damaging problem of time poverty for teachers.

KEYWORDS:

• Workload
• work intensification
• time poverty
• teachers’ work

Introduction

The work of teachers and school leaders is an ongoing issue for education systems. On the one hand, the work that is done in schools remains highly politicised with respect to what is taught, how it is taught, what children learn and how that learning is measured (Stacey et al., 2022). On the other hand, despite the politicisation of education work, systems and governments remain concerned about the attractiveness of teaching as a career, about teacher and school leader burnout, and about the effects of work on stress and wellbeing (e.g. Department of Education Australian Government, 2022). It is the concept of teachers’ work¹ that drives this paper. Globally, there is a belief that teachers’ work has changed in recent decades: workload is heavier and more intense (Department of Education Australian Government (2022); Green, 2021; OECD, 2021). These changes contribute to the myriad of complex factors explaining the attrition of experienced teachers from the profession and suggest why teaching has become an unattractive career for many young people (Thompson et al., 2021). Concerns about the relationship between work and stress, burnout and attrition are also evident in professions such as medicine (Walter et al., 2017); law (Tremblay & Mascova, 2015); and government (Byrne & Theakston, 2015).

The enduring problem of teachers’ and school leaders’ experience of work remains a policy problem. Systemic responses largely focus on targeted responses to workload, such as reducing the number of teaching hours or providing suites of lesson plans (e.g. Carroll & Heffernan, 2022). These responses reveal a simplistic understanding of pressure points within teachers’ work, influenced by the poor demarcation between the concepts of workload and work intensification. In response, this paper reports on a systematic analysis of how teachers’ workload and work intensification are conceptualised in the literature as a means to generate clearer definitions, posit how these concepts are related and how they can be further advanced through the concept of time poverty. The literature presented shows the complexity of understanding workload and work intensification for teachers. For example, the first paper published after 2000 by Easthope and Easthope (2000, p. 43), reported that over the last 10 years, teachers perceived they were “working longer hours, teaching more students and having increased professional, pastoral and administrative duties”. The story that the research tells remains remarkably consistent with Easthope and Easthope’s (2000) findings: teachers perceive that they are working more, and that work is more complex than it used to be. What is evolving in this space, however, are (a) new definitions and conceptual advances, particularly in how we think about work complexity and intensity (see Beck, 2017; Maas et al., 2021; Stacey et al., 2020) and (b) new methods for capturing and measuring the complexity of teachers’ working lives (see Allen et al., 2021; Green, 2021; te Braak et al., 2022).

This systematic synthesis proceeds in four parts. First, the paper will position the problem of teachers’ subjective experiences of workload and work intensification in the broader context of social acceleration as a theoretical basis to connect workload, and work intensification with the experience of being time poor. Here we define the concepts of workload and work intensification, definitions which will guide our analysis of the literature. Second, we outline the research process undertaken for this systematic research synthesis. Third, we present our findings in the form of an analysis of the key categories that emerged from the literature. Finally, we present a short discussion and conclusion, suggesting how the problem of workload and work intensification could be conceptualised as a way towards better understanding the problem and as a pathway to potential solutions.

A widespread concern about “the pace of life”

Concerns about workload and work intensification map onto a larger concern about the acceleration of social life (Rosa, 2013). This phenomenon has encouraged sociologists to research why there appears to be less time available for social and personal flourishing. Social acceleration refers to those feelings of hurriedness, with a particular emphasis on the perception that the pace of life is too fast (Bergener & Santarius, 2021). Work is considered a significant part of this experience of being rushed or hurried. This experience of time poverty, for Rosa, is a perceived “heightening of the pace of life through an increase of episodes of action and/or experience per unit of time”. Perceptions of increased workload/more intense work that contribute to “the hurried workplace” are examples of that social acceleration (Rosa, 2010, p. 88), and concerns about teachers’ work are reflective of the notion of the hurried workplace. Feelings of hurriedness, of there not being enough time, of the pace of the teaching day being too rushed, increasingly have effects outside of work time, linked to health and wellbeing issues, and an inability to sustain a healthy work/life balance, along with a commensurate shrinking of leisure time (Braun, 2017; Lawrence et al., 2019; Pyhältö et al., 2011).

Many educational jurisdictions have published reports outlining their concerns about the future of teaching. For example, the recent Issues Paper: Teacher Workforce Shortages (Department of Education, 2022, p. 6) released in Australia, argued that “[t]eacher workloads and their complexity have increased over time”, contributing both to attrition and a decline in people choosing teaching as a career. The OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), last conducted in 2018, surveys teachers and school leaders on their job satisfaction, working conditions and likelihood of attrition. Workload is self-reported as an average number of hours worked per week and is then related to other items to create a workplace stress indicator (OECD, 2019). Results on these items and factors vary between countries and jurisdictions, however, what is most obvious in TALIS is that workload is the dominant concept because of the ease with which it is measured. Intensity of work, meanwhile, is identified tangentially through concerns about the complexity of classrooms. The relationship between workload and work intensification in TALIS is assumed rather than explicit. This exemplifies a problem for the field: while workload and work intensification are both experiences of temporality that have significant subjective qualities, our argument is that they are best thought of as independent vectors of a larger phenomenon – the experience of time and its scarcity that we call time poverty. The amount of work and intensity of work are distinct concerns. Without a clear understanding of the two concepts and their relationship, it is likely that attempts to intervene will always fall short.

Workload

Workload is usually defined in the literature as the amount of work done over a given period. This is commonly a measure elicited through self-report, such as via surveys. For example, the TALIS 2018 survey asked teachers and school leaders “During your most recent complete calendar week, approximately how many 60 minute hours did you spend in total on tasks related to your job at this school?” (OECD, 2018). This question generated the number of hours worked each week which was consequently used in the analysis as the measure of workload. This example represents the most common way of reporting on perceived workload and suggests a quotidian notion of time use.

Work intensification

Work intensification, on the other hand, is a concept associated with the complexity and demands associated with a particular task or set of tasks considered a core part of a job. Apple’s (2004, p. 25) work intensification thesis argued that teachers’ work has been made more intense by “considerably heavier workloads” intersecting with accountability demands, less frontline support and a decline in resourcing. However, the problem with this definition is that workload essentially becomes a subset of intensity, rather than a distinct concept within the field of teachers’ work. A better definition, and one that emerges from the literature, draws on Beck’s (2017) concept of “heavy hours” that refer to the feeling of being pulled in multiple directions at once due to the competing and contradictory demands at a given point in time. Wacjman (2014) describes this feeling of multiple pressures as a “more complex temporal patterning of experience”, as if time is compressed.

To summarise, there is considerable concern around teachers’ work, and this concern is expressed as negatively impacting job satisfaction, attrition, and the attractiveness of teaching as a career (Thompson et al., 2021). Key factors identified by governments and extra-state actors such as the OECD are workload and the complexity, or intensification, of work. These factors appear to be related yet the links between them remain unclear. It would clearly be of benefit to systems, and is thus the intention of this literature review, to understand how workload and work intensification work together to explain the time poverty of the contemporary teacher.

Method

A systematic literature review enables us to examine the empirical work related to workload and work intensification for teachers and principals. Our approach is called a research synthesis, an approach to a systematic understanding of literature on given topics informed by systematic review methods (Suri, 2013). A research synthesis is useful to review the scope and depth of knowledge about a problem. Further, by identifying links that may not have been evident between multiple studies on a similar topic, new understandings can be generated (Suri, 2013). In carrying out the search phase, specific guidance was sought from literature pertaining to the pursuit of various forms of systematic reviews in the social sciences, and specifically, in the field of education (Alexander, 2020; Newman & Gough, 2020). Faculty librarians assisted in the development of a protocol to progress the review. They provided support in optimising databases and database searches. Professional advice was sought from colleagues with experience in writing systematic reviews (Luu, 2021). Based on this guidance, we located the project within MS Teams, with the management of the site overseen by one member of the research team, and all materials easily accessible to the whole team. A search was done of collection sites for systematic reviews, in PROSPERO, Cochrane and Campbell using the search terms “teach*” and “time” and “workload”, but none were found related to this topic.

A systematic literature review protocol was devised iteratively, based collectively on the advice outlined above. For the database searches, discussed in more detail below, we adapted the SPIDER tool (see Cooke et al., 2012). The acronym SPIDER is used to help build the required search terms for use with databases: Sample, Phenomenon of Interest, Evaluation and Research Type. As we intended our searches to be inclusive of all research methodologies (quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods) we dropped Research Type from our search terms. Database searches were carried out in September 2021 and rerun in February 2022. Our search terms are presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Search terms adapted from the SPIDER tool (Cooke et al., 2012).

	Sample (group who are focus of study)	Phenomenon of interest	Evaluation
Synonyms	teach* educator school leader principal school*	workload load “teaching load” “working hours” “intensification” “work*life balance” “work stress” “work obligation” “job stressor” “work stressor” “job demand*” “work demand*” time “accelerat*” “hour” (NOT stress, burnout, attrition, wellbeing, resilience)	experience* opinion* attitude* perce* belie* feel* know* understand* view* insight* perspective*

A few initial inclusion and exclusion criteria were defined. To be included, articles needed to be in English and published between January 2000 and January 2022. This timeframe corresponds to the onset of international large-scale assessments in schooling (e.g. PISA was first administered in 2000) as this is seen as the beginning of the globalisation of performative school policy. This, then, provides a useful means and justification to compare teachers’ work internationally (which has further expanded with TALIS from 2008). We excluded research dissertations and theses, as well as grey literature. Whilst there is considerable relevant grey literature in the form of commissioned research for governments (for example, House of Representative Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training, 2019) and teacher unions (for example, Rothman et al., 2018) pertaining to workload, we made the decision to include only peer-reviewed publications reporting empirical research.

For the search, we used the following education databases: ERIC (including ProQuest), Education Source, SCOPUS and A+. The search terms yielded 905 papers which were then reviewed and excluded if their focus was on:

• students rather than teachers;

• outside the range of Foundation (F)-12 schooling²;

• in another field (for example medicine);

• about families, pre-service teachers, or situated within the field of higher education; or

• the impact of COVID-19 on teacher workload.

Additionally, opinion pieces and purely theoretical papers were also excluded.

An Endnote library was created for the systematic review and papers from each of the databases were imported into their own folders within the library. Duplicates were then identified and deleted. Following this review process, 83 papers remained.

Next, each member of the team reviewed the title and abstract of each of the 83 papers to determine whether they should be included in the review. This process was facilitated by the creation of a spreadsheet as a working document, listing titles and abstracts, in MS Teams. We then met and discussed any papers where there was not universal agreement as to inclusion or exclusion. At this stage of the review, papers were excluded if the abstract did not explicitly mention any one of the factors of work intensification, workload and time. Consequently, papers that focused on related issues such as teacher burnout, job satisfaction, or emotional exhaustion were omitted, as were papers where the context of “school” was in fact in a university, or English language college and thus outside the F-12 school range. The remaining 50 papers were then divided between the team with the requirement that papers be read in full, to determine their relevance. Justification for exclusion needed to be provided. In order to check consensus, we reviewed and discussed the same four papers before beginning this final review process. At this stage, papers were excluded if they were not clearly aligned with the tri-focus of our study on workload, work intensification and time. For a few of the papers, where there was vacillation as to suitability, a second reviewer read the paper. Finally, 33 papers were selected for inclusion, and in reading the full papers, each reviewer was able to note any additional referenced papers which had not been picked up through the database searches. Through this hand-searching process, an additional seven papers were added, resulting in 40 papers in total identified for the systematic literature review.

Our synthesis of literature aimed to address the following research questions:

1. How are the concepts of workload and work intensification operationalised for the collection of empirical data on these phenomena, and

2. How may work intensification and workload explain F-12 teacher/school leader experiences of being time poor?

In this study, we were not aiming to conduct a quality appraisal of the research included in the review, but rather to map the conceptualisations and understand the relationship between them. There is capacity for evaluation of the studies as a future focus of research.

Results of literature synthesis

The papers included in the synthesis broadly fell into two categories. The first is definitional, aligned with our first research question, differentiating between a pragmatic depiction of workload, and a related and more interrogative exploration of work intensification. We note that both “workload” and “work intensification” were often used interchangeably, appearing to sometimes be understood as synonymous terms. We applied our definitions as presented above to clearly delineate between these. The second category, presented in two parts, is experiential, corresponding to our second research question, and centres on the effects associated with increasing workload and work intensification. First are the effects for teachers, in terms of health, wellbeing and teacher attrition. Second are the effects on capacity to deliver educational priorities for all students. While some of the 40 studies drawn on in this review fell neatly into one of the four sub-categories, most cut across two or more, such that these might be seen as interwoven across the literature presented in this review. Table 2 presents a summary overview of the studies included in the following analysis and the categories they fall into (in year order, from most recent year, and in alphabetical order of authors for each year).

Table 2. Overview of analysis of studies used in literature review.

				Workload		Intens’n
Author, Year, and Country	Method	Participants & school levels included in study	Aim of the study	Te	Pr	Te	Pr	Context	Impact Health	Impact Educ	No. of Themes
te Braak et al., 2022, Belgium	Quantitative questionnaires time diaries	7 486 teachers K, P, S	To compare data collected using time diaries and survey questions	✔							1
Allen et al., 2021, England	Quantitative Secondary data analysis	4 datasets P, S	To analyse teachers’ working hours using four datasets	✔							1
Buskila & Chen-Levi, 2021, Israel	Quantitative Questionnaire	321 teachers P, M, H	To investigate teachers’ sources of stress in their workload						✔		1
Gavin et al., 2021, Australia	Quantitative Secondary data analysis	48 741 teachers P, S	To synthesise contemporary large scale surveys of teacher workload	✔				✔			2
Green, 2021, Britain	Quantitative Secondary data analysis	857 teachers N, P, S, Sp	To analyse trends in teachers’ job quality			✔					1
Maas et al., 2021, Switzerland	Quantitative Online questionnaires	1 071 teachers P, S	To examine the reciprocal relationship between teachers’ perceived time pressure and emotional exhaustion and whether received social support from the school principal buffers this relationship.			✔			✔		2
Reid & Creed, 2021, US	Qualitative interviews	10 principals E, M, H	To determine how much time principals spend on work outside of traditional school hours, how that time is used, and impact on principals’ job satisfaction.		✔						1
Thompson et al., 2021, England, Canada, Australia and NZ	Qualitative interviews	130 school leaders, policy makers, union leaders, dept officers P, S	To explore perceptions of and issues associated with work intensification, school autonomy and accountability policies.	✔		✔		✔			3
Wang et al., 2021, Canada	Quantitative Online questionnaire	863 vice principals E, S, E&S	To examine the increasing complexity and volume of the work of vice principals.		✔						1
Boström et al., 2020, Sweden	Quantitative Questionnaires	478 teachers E	To describe how male and female teachers experience their health, organisational and social work environment, and the psychosocial safety climate in the workplace.			✔		✔	✔		3
Burrow et al., 2020, UK	Qualitative Case narrative	1 teacher S	To narrate the realities of how teachers have been stripped of time and the freedom to operate and innovate.			✔					1
Sato et al., 2020, Japan	Qualitative Interviews	8 teachers E	To investigate the experiences of teachers who have among the longest working hours in the world.	✔							1
Skaalvik, 2020, Norway	Quantitative Questionnaires	340 principals E, H	To explore principals’ perceptions of job-related demands and resources and how perceived job demands and job resources are related to job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, and motivation to leave the job.				✔				1
Stacey et al., 2020, Australia	Qualitative Interviews	31 teachers P, S, Ce	To engage with the issue of teachers’ work and workload, in the context of a devolved public education policy.	✔				✔		✔	3
Tapala et al., 2020, South Africa	Qualitative Interviews	12 heads of dept S	To report on the barriers experienced by HODs in executing their curriculum leadership roles.			✔					1
Türkoglu & Cansoy, 2020, Turkey	Qualitative Interviews	13 principals P, S	To examine various factors affecting workload of principals including psychological effects and coping strategies.		✔				✔		2
Wang, 2020, Canada	Qualitative Interviews	18 principals & vice-principals E, S, H	To explore in what ways job demands are manifested in school administrators’ intensified work conditions and how their perception of job demands helps them to create a sense of control.		✔		✔				2
Zydziunaite et al., 2020, Lithuania	Quantitative Questionnaire	418 teachers P, S, V	To identify the relationship between teacher workload, time allocation, self-esteem, and leadership at school.						✔		1
De Carlo et al., 2019, Italy	Quantitative Questionnaire	122 teachers S	To examine the relationship between contextual work-related factors in terms of job demands and job resources, and work-family conflict in teachers.			✔			✔		2
Fitzgerald et al., 2019, Australia	Qualitative Interviews	10 teachers P, S	To explore changes in work demands experienced by NSW teachers in the context of OECD reports of these teachers working in or near the statistical category of “very long working hours”.	✔				✔			2
Lawrence et al., 2019, Australia	Quantitative Online survey	215 teachers S	To investigate teachers’ experiences of work intensification and wellbeing.	✔		✔			✔		3
Lim, 2019, Canada	Qualitative Case narrative	13 principals S	To provide a narrative account of work intensification experienced by secondary vice-principals.				✔				1
Lim & Pollock, 2019, Canada	Qualitative Interviews	13 principals S	To determine how secondary principals’ work intensification has influenced their understanding of the secondary vice-principal role.		✔						1
Manuel et al., 2018, Australia	Quantitative Questionnaire	211 teachers S	To gather data on English teachers’ work and lives, including their perspectives on workload, motivation, work satisfaction, wellbeing, and career intentions.	✔						✔	2
Wang et al., 2018, Canada	Quantitative Questionnaire	1 423 principals E, S	To examine principals’ job satisfaction in relation to their work intensification.						✔		1
Beck, 2017, Canada	Qualitative Narrative inquiry	3 teachers P, S	To narrate the experiences of teachers experiencing work intensification.	✔						✔	2
Nilsson et al., 2017, Sweden	Quantitative Questionnaire	338 teachers Co	To examine resources related to teachers’ experience of the work-life balance.						✔		1
Torres, 2016, US	Quantitative Secondary data analysis	398 teachers E, M, H	To examine the claim that an unsustainable workload is the primary cause of teacher turnover at Charter Management Organisations.						✔		1
Pollock et al., 2015, Canada	Quantitative Online questionnaire	1 423 principals E, S, E&S	To understand what and how factors which drive work intensification interact to complicate principals’ work.		✔		✔				2
Van Droogenbroeck et al., 2014, Belgium	Quantitative Secondary data analysis	1 878 teachers School level not stated – working and retired teachers.	To examine how four interpersonal relationships (students, colleagues, supervisors, and parents) teaching-related and non-teaching-related workload and autonomy are related to teacher burnout.			✔		✔	✔		3
Yost & Boardman, 2014, Australia	Mixed Questionnaires and interviews	65 teachers P	To examine early childhood teachers’ perceptions of teaching in Department of Education classrooms, including perceptions of having a lack of time.						✔		1
Ahlgren & Gådin, 2011, Sweden	Qualitative Interviews	18 female teachers E	To explore, from a gender perspective, elementary school teachers’ experiences of their work situation, and identify conditions that could be health risks.			✔		✔			2
Ballet & Kelchtermans, 2009, Belgium	Qualitative Case studies	4 schools (26 teachers/principals) P	To research how primary school teachers experience their working conditions, under the conditions of work intensification.	✔						✔	2
Brante, 2009, Sweden	Quantitative Diary entries (organisational sampling method)	59 teachers P, JH, US	To examine teachers’ work conditions and the practice of multitasking.			✔					1
Ballet & Kelchtermans, 2008, Belgium	Qualitative Case study	4 teachers, 1 principal E	To research how primary school teachers experience their working conditions, under the conditions of work intensification.	✔						✔	2
Wotherspoon, 2008, Canada	Quantitative Questionnaires	344 teachers E, S, E&S, Band	To explore the changing occupational nature of teaching in relation to initiatives to improve education for Aboriginal people.							✔	1
Timms et al., 2007, Australia	Quantitative Questionnaire	298 teachers P, H, P-12, K	To establish an understanding of the relationship of workload to burnout and/or engagement with work.	✔							1
Bartlett, 2004, US	Qualitative Time diaries, interviews and observation	26 teachers S	To examine the tensions between an expanded conception of teachers’ work and the work demands and strains introduced by such a conception.						✔	✔	2
Cranston & Ehrich, 2002, Australia	Mixed Questionnaire and interviews	108 principals, 3 dept officers S	To examine the role and workload of secondary school principals throughout Queensland, Australia.		✔		✔				2
Easthope & Easthope, 2000, Australia	Qualitative Interviews and focus groups	20 teachers S, US	To examine whether intensification adequately explains the perceptions teachers had of their work, the role of professional commitment, and actions teachers took to deal with increasing work pressure.	✔		✔		✔		✔	4

Note. School levels are presented as reported in the papers. Band = First Nations school, Ce = Central (P & S), Co = Compulsory, E = Elementary, H = High, JH = Junior High, K = Kindergarten, M = Middle, N = Nursery, P = Primary, S = Secondary, Sp = Special, US = Upper Secondary, V = Vocational. Pr = Principal, Te = Teacher.

The nature of workload and work intensification

Workload

Workload is presented as quantitatively measurable and thus more easily described and detailed empirically. Generally, workload is constructed as the amount of teachers’ work, measured in hours. Methodologically, measurement of workload commonly takes the form of questionnaires asking educators to retrospectively estimate time allocated to work tasks. However, more contemporary literature has critiqued this approach as generating questionable data because of potential inaccuracy of recall and have instead utilised more immediate time-use diaries, made easier by online technology (see Allen et al., 2021; te Braak et al., 2022). Of the 40 studies, 17 studies reported hours of work being done by teachers or school leaders and of these 17, five reported working hours in excess of 50 hours per week, usually spilling into weekends and other personal time (Allen et al., 2021; Manuel et al., 2018; Sato et al., 2020; Thompson et al., 2021; Timms et al., 2007). A Japanese study of elementary school teachers, for example, reported that participants worked between 13.5 and 16 hours at school on a usual weekday (equating to up to 75 hours per week), identifying considerable demands (e.g. mentoring and lesson observation for professional development) on teacher time and insufficient resources to offset these demands (Sato et al., 2020). Teachers’ workload is often reported to be increasing (Ballet & Kelchtermans, 2008; Beck, 2017 Timms et al., 2007) and many studies utilised international and national survey data to argue this point (reported, for example, in Fitzgerald et al., 2019; Manuel et al., 2018; Stacey et al., 2020). However, Allen et al. (2021, p. 678) argue that teachers’ working hours, (differentiated from workload) have remained constant for the preceding 25 years.

Studies generally observed that workload had increased because of the intrusion of “non-core” tasks into the expected work of teachers (Ballet & Kelchtermans, 2009; Easthope & Easthope, 2000; Fitzgerald et al., 2019; Gavin et al., 2021; Lawrence et al., 2019). Lawrence et al. (2019), for example, argued that teachers remain satisfied with their teaching workload, but are dissatisfied with their non-teaching workload. For teachers, non-teaching or non-core work included administration labelled as “paperwork” (Timms et al., 2007), curricular reform (Manuel et al., 2018) and compliance with accountability frameworks (Manuel et al., 2018; Stacey et al., 2020). Stacey et al. (2020) reported teachers are likely to “triage” their work to deal with excessive workload, so as to manage tasks including data collection (for example, records of student behaviour and welfare issues) and accountability requirements (for example, reporting to parents, attending meetings).

The workload experienced by principals (Cranston & Ehrich, 2002; Pollock et al., 2015; Reid & Creed, 2021; Wang, 2020) and vice-principals (Lim & Pollock, 2019; Wang et al., 2021) was similarly reported to range from 50 hours per week to upwards of 60 hours per week. Principals reported that their workload included all facets of school management, and extended now into managing legal issues, marketing the school, pursuing alternative income sources to pay for school resources, and networking with a wide range of stakeholders including local businesses and the tertiary sector (Cranston & Ehrich, 2002; Pollock et al., 2015). A number of the papers reported principals’ belief that their non-educative work (focused on school management, budget and demands from stakeholders) was impacting their capacity to dedicate time to educational leadership (Cranston & Ehrich, 2002; Pollock et al., 2015; Türkoglu & Cansoy, 2020; Wang, 2020). While these themes appear broadly constant over the past 25 years, a focus of recent research has been the workload of vice/deputy principals. The vice/deputy principal is expected to manage school operational procedures and support the principal’s role (Lim & Pollock, 2019). Vice/deputy-principals reported that their expanded workload was often focused on responding to the immediacy of student discipline issues (the primary time-using activity) and operationally-focused activities with limited training and support (Wang et al., 2021). Recent research also affirms work patterns outside of traditional working hours, exacerbated by the development of technologies which make principals “available” at more times throughout the day and night. Reid and Creed (2021) found that approximately one-quarter of the principals’ total working hours were carried out in the evenings and on weekends. Principals prioritised being visible and present for teachers and students during school hours but the ramification of this was that administrative work had to be done outside of school hours (Reid & Creed, 2021; Wang, 2020). Visibility via attendance at school-related events, email communication and thorough oversight of school-related social media activity have also been identified as increasing workload during non-traditional hours (Reid & Creed, 2021).

Work intensification

Work intensification is defined within the literature as an increase in workload with the added dimension of greater time pressure in attending to tasks, triggered by the quantity and changing nature of tasks, and/or the complexity of tasks (Easthope & Easthope, 2000; Green, 2021; Lawrence et al., 2019; Thompson et al., 2021). For example, Green (2021, p. 390 referencing Green 2001, p. 56) defines work intensification as “the rate of physical and/or mental input to work tasks performed during the working day”. The measurement of work intensification within the research literature brings together the concepts of teacher workload and the experience of feeling under pressure. Studies using quantitative methodologies often utilise or adapt sets of indicators measuring these phenomena (Boström et al., 2020; De Carlo et al., 2019; Lawrence et al., 2019; Maas et al., 2021; Skaalvik, 2020; Van Droogenbroeck et al., 2014). For example, Green (2021) combined variables measuring the extent to which the teacher “works hard”, the frequency of needing to work at a high speed and the frequency of working to tight deadlines (Green, 2021). Using data from the British Skills and Employment Survey, Green (2021) found evidence that no other profession worked as intensively as the teaching profession, and that from 1992, teachers’ work intensity had followed an upward trend on each indicator of his work intensity index.

Research literature focused on the intensification of teachers’ work ranges from the listing of tasks constituting workload, often identifying the “uncounted” tasks which expand workload, through to interrogating the lived experience of work intensification. Easthope and Easthope (2000) move the discussion of workload to one of work intensification by framing work intensification as workload oriented: “more of the same work, (and) … different tasks being added to the teacher’s day” (p. 53). Further, their close examination of workload revealed multiple factors at play: “time-table manoeuvres”, with adjusted hours of work and increased class sizes; a shift to criterion-based assessment; the requirement for teachers to increasingly engage with administration as a requisite for career progression; and greater heterogeneity in the student population contributing to more challenging classrooms requiring new skill sets of teachers (Easthope & Easthope, 2000). Narrative accounts of work intensification document highly pressured working lives for teachers (Burrow et al., 2020) and school leaders (Lim, 2019). In understanding the challenges of curriculum leadership, Tapala et al. (2020) found that Heads of Department in South African schools felt overworked and worried about burnout, understanding lack of time as both a structural problem and an existential condition. In focusing on heavy workload, Brante (2009) labelled the ways in which teachers multitask as “synchronous work” with the findings suggesting “problems concerning relaxing, overload, quality of work done and fragmentations of work” (p. 433). Work intensification is also reported in terms of an imposition on teaching time, in which teachers, frequently female, are required to be “a psychologist, a parent and a mother, because of the constant cutbacks in school nurses, welfare officers and so forth” (Ahlgren & Gådin, 2011, S113). Ahlgren and Gådin (2011) depict these social tasks as “time thieves”, taking time from teaching and lesson preparation. The burden of work intensification has been termed “heavy hours”, characterised by “rapid professional decision-making in the midst of complexity; being pulled in multiple directions, too many to turn to in an hour; and the residue that lingers after the hour is over” (Beck, 2017, p. 623). Work intensification thus invokes notions of exhausting pressure, complexity, competing priorities, and performative accountability.

For principals, workload encompasses different responsibilities (Türkoglu & Cansoy, 2020) and becomes work intensification when heavy workload is translated into multiple competing priorities including: “strategic leadership, educational/curriculum leadership, management/administration, student issues, parent/community issues and staffing issues” (Cranston & Ehrich, 2002, p. 17). Thompson et al. (2021) report the heavy workload of school leaders as the result of escalating administrative tasks because of decentralised systems, in the context of expanded school autonomy requiring schools to be run increasingly as businesses, with principals assuming CEO roles with little to no training. Similarly, Pollock et al.’s (2015) analysis of the work of Canadian principals described their role as that of “middle managers” as an outcome of loss of autonomy and work intensification, with principals in this study reporting they “never seem to have enough time to do their work … (and) felt pressured to work long hours” with insufficient resources (p. 558). Skaalvik (2020) examined principals’ perceptions of job demands and resources and how these are related to emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction and motivation to leave, in a Norwegian study which showed that time pressure (equated with work overload in this study), and demanding parents were positively related to emotional exhaustion, with time pressure predictive of lower job satisfaction. Principals’ experiences of work intensification are marked in the research by a relentless demand to provide both managerial and educative leadership resulting in unsustainable working responses and a declining sense of control over their work situation (Reid & Creed, 2021; Wang, 2020).

Context for increased workload and work intensification

Largely, the intensification of teachers’ work is contextualised and associated with the policy shifts which characterise the marketisation of education (Gavin et al., 2021; Thompson et al., 2021). The reforms which mark marketisation (and privatisation) shift the goal of education as a force for social democratisation to one in which education is positioned as an economic commodity (Gavin et al., 2021), or private, positional good. Economic efficiency in education has been translated to forms of autonomy in schools, putatively responsive to their specific population needs but invariably shifting the responsibility for individual learner needs and educative outcomes to the school and the classroom teacher. Conjointly, education systems have shifted from prioritising services of learning support (now the responsibility of schools) to engagement in the construction and management of auditing processes, with, for example, high-stakes standardised testing, to manage schools “at a distance” (Thompson et al., 2021). Schools and teachers are held to account via the datafication of education, a process which quantifies and measures educational achievement in ways which allow ranking and comparison. Spicksley (2022, p. 2) argues that work intensification is caused by the “performativity culture” brought about by policy mandates in English schools. These interrelated and complex policy processes serve to reconstitute the teacher from trustworthy professional to being monitored and accountable in measurable ways. Much of the literature reported in this review, across the time span of the studies, explicitly connects these policy shifts with a heavier and more intense working life for educators working in schools (for example, Easthope & Easthope, 2000; Fitzgerald et al., 2019; Gavin et al., 2021; Van Droogenbroeck et al., 2014).

The experience of work intensification has been described in the literature as a second-order effect of policies driving performativity pressures and reduced funding for support services and for schools, generating difficult conditions under which teachers and school leaders must continue to deliver high-quality educational service (Fitzgerald et al., 2019). The experience of work intensification is thus driven by pressure from education departments characterised by “excessive impost of unceasing change, new initiatives, new programmes, new data reporting and lack of assessment about which changes and policies work well and which do not” (Stacey et al., 2020, p. 10). Thompson et al. (2021) further refine this idea arguing that autonomy and work intensification are “mediated by audit and accountability cultures operating within education systems”, giving a more nuanced appraisal of the drivers of intensification, which may vary in their relationships, across different national settings. Finally, some papers (Ahlgren & Gådin, 2011; Boström et al., 2020) report a gendered dimension which relates to workload, work pace, and work intensification being more strongly experienced by female teachers, who make up the majority of the teaching workforce in many countries (OECD, 2022). Swedish elementary school teachers reported “high work pace and emotional demands” at work, with female teachers reporting significantly higher stress levels and more exhaustion than male teachers (Boström et al., 2020). Boström et al. (2020, p. 227) suggest “female teachers are more likely than men to perform ‘invisible’ work tasks (e.g., practical and social tasks for teachers, pupils, and parents), which accordingly result in an increase in female teachers’ workload and stress-levels”. Similar experiences are reported in Ahlgren and Gådin’s (2011) all-female study of elementary teachers in Sweden. Because the teaching workforce in many countries is heavily skewed towards women, there is a clear need for further research on workload and work intensification from the perspective of gender.

The impact of increased workload and work intensification

Impact on the health and wellbeing of teachers

Workload and work intensification impact the health and wellbeing of educators. Studies observed that the lives of teachers, vice-principals and principals were affected negatively in their satisfaction with work (for example Wang et al., 2018), in their personal relationships (Bartlett, 2004; De Carlo et al., 2019) and in their own health (Boström et al., 2020; Buskila & Chen-Levi, 2021; Wang et al., 2021). De Carlo et al. (2019, p. 6) reported that “workload, in terms of both the amount of work to be done in a given time (i.e. quantitative workload) and the difficulty or complexity of the job (i.e. qualitative workload), may play a central role in the onset of work-family conflict in teachers”. A Swedish study of 338 teachers found that most of the participants reported that they were not able to complete their work on time and that experience of time had the strongest association (of four factors) with work-life balance (Nilsson et al., 2017). Nilsson et al. (2017, p. 597) reported that this was a “worrying” finding because the feeling which comes from accomplishing and completing work is both salutogenic and necessary for psychological resilience.

Stress as an outcome of heavy workload and feelings of time pressure were reported in several studies, including the high-stress levels experienced particularly by female Swedish elementary teachers reported by Boström et al. (2020) and Ahlgren and Gådin (2011). An Israeli study sought to identify sources of stress for teachers at three levels of schools (primary, middle and high school) and identify any differences in teachers working at these levels (Buskila & Chen-Levi, 2021). For all three stages of schooling, teachers reported that the intense teaching schedule with insufficient breaks was the primary source of stress; the second factor for two of the levels (middle and secondary) was the need for teachers to take work home, triggering conflict between home and work demands (Buskila & Chen-Levi, 2021). A heavy workload was related to time allocation difficulties for teachers working in Lithuanian schools, when trying to manage the multiple activities required in the classroom and the school, and this in turn resulted in greater stress and lower teacher self-esteem (Zydziunaite et al., 2020). Workload was similarly identified as a source of stress and mental fatigue for principals in Turkey, who reported a lack of time to allocate to their families (Türkoglu & Cansoy, 2020).

The intensification of teachers’ work was reported in a number of studies to be associated with measures of teacher burnout. Lawrence et al. (2019) found that workload was associated with burnout (usually measured through the three dimensions of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and personal accomplishment), however, organisational support was influential in this relationship. They found that non-teaching workload was associated with all measures of burnout whereas teaching workload was a predictor only of emotional exhaustion (Lawrence et al., 2019). This is similar to Van Droogenbroeck et al.’s (2014) study of burnout amongst senior teachers in Belgium informed by the intensification thesis and its impact on teacher attrition. The main finding was that both non-teaching workload and teaching workload were related to emotional exhaustion. Maas et al. (2021) found that time pressure is a job demand associated with emotional exhaustion and that school principals can, through social support, counter time pressure and associated emotional exhaustion.

Finally, some of the literature suggested that the health and wellbeing of educators, influenced by workload and work intensification, were related to rates of attrition. Perhaps surprisingly, reference to attrition was not highly prevalent in the literature we found. Easthope and Easthope (2000) reported that some teachers saw work intensification and its requirements destructive to their own professionalism, and thus chose to leave teaching. Bartlett (2004) noted the problem of attrition as a consequence of workload issues, and Van Droogenbroeck et al. (2014) listed research connecting burnout and attrition in their study of burnout among senior teachers. Torres (2016) found that workload was associated with turnover of staff in charter schools. Yost and Boardman (2014) found that working additional hours outside work hours including on Sundays because of inadequate non-contact time was linked to health and well-being issues for early childhood teachers and that coping strategies included switching to job sharing or shifting to part-time work. Partly this is because of the complex factors that predict attrition. Workload and work intensification are factors in some decisions to leave the profession, but are far from the only ones. We agree with Bartlett (2004), that the relationship between workload, work intensification and attrition needs further research.

Several studies, by nature of the study designs, extrapolated potential remedies for teacher health and wellbeing issues associated with workload and the situation of work intensification. The majority of these spoke to the role of leadership in schools and advocated greater social support from principals (Lawrence et al., 2019; Maas et al., 2021), training for school leaders in family-supportive behaviours (De Carlo et al., 2019), ongoing monitoring of teacher perceptions by school leaders (Torres, 2016) and enabling greater autonomy and initiative-taking by involving teachers in school decision making (De Carlo et al., 2019; Van Droogenbroeck et al., 2014). Van Droogenbroeck et al. (2014, p. 107) drew attention to the need to align non-teaching activities with “the well-being and achievement” of students, as when this relationship is opaque, the added value of these activities was “perceived as disproportionate to the time investment required”. Other papers offered more general advice, pertaining to policy changes which attend to sources of teacher stress (Bartlett, 2004) or address health-related issues (Yost & Boardman, 2014). Research specifically with principals argued that principals are constrained in their capacity to distribute authority and responsibility (Türkoglu & Cansoy, 2020) while Wang et al. (2018) noted that the quality of principals’ work would be improved if principals were allowed more responsibility with more time allocated to instructional leadership.

Impact on delivery of educational priorities

Related to the impact of workload and work intensification on the health and wellbeing of teachers, was the impact on the delivery of educational priorities. The literature reported a shift in how teachers perceive and enact their role within education, troubled by the imposition of accountability measures which drive their experiences of work intensification. Earlier analysis of this shift (for example Bartlett, 2004; Easthope & Easthope, 2000) portrays work intensification as intimately entangled with teachers’ ideological sense of their moral purpose, heightening their commitment to their roles, regardless of the conditions. These papers suggest that the experiences of teachers can be managed by a pragmatic attention to those factors which are important, and which teachers can control. Ballet and Kelchtermans (2008, 2009) also pick up this theme and explore the “experience of intensification” for teachers, a phrase they adopt to flag that work intensification is partly a product of the increased pressure teachers impose upon themselves, because of their own beliefs about good teaching as a willingness to change. In these earlier studies, teachers are depicted as seeing calls for change coming from external forces – policy makers, departments, school boards – as compelling, but also come to understand that non-teaching work, such as administrative tasks, is not necessarily useful to students but may be required for their own rendering as competent teachers. Writing about the phenomenon more recently, Manuel et al. (2018) pragmatically reported that while there is a commitment to the ideals of teaching there is a push-back against this by many because of the intractable workload issue.

In the light of intensification of work, various forms of routinisation are re-emerging as a coping mechanism. This works against other reforms such as those committed to supporting and improving the educational outcomes of at-risk students. As described above, intensification is experienced as pressure to complete multiple competing tasks across the school day, and teachers have reported that because of this pressure they cannot “adequately address all learning needs” because “there is not enough time” (Wotherspoon, 2008). Similarly, Beck (2017, p. 631) reports that “teachers are struggling to find a way to hold the multiple and increasing demands of teaching within the confines of each heavy hour in ways that allow them to create educative environments with and for their students”. Teachers have reported they are exhausted and unable to fulfil what they consider to be teaching obligations, with concern for students, and the actioning of this, perceived to be central to teacher professionalism (Easthope & Easthope, 2000). In reducing workload, routine procedures take precedence over innovation where intensification becomes “fragmentation, a tendency to segment work roles, selective responsiveness to particular aspects of their work, and sometimes tension in and beyond the school, rather than in any singular form” (Wotherspoon, 2008, p. 412). In Wotherspoon’s (2008) analysis, teachers struggle with the time required for relationship building and community engagement fundamental to supporting Indigenous education, set against the backdrop of work intensification. Other papers report that teachers describe a “residue” of guilt that they can’t put time into the social-emotional problems that are increasingly prevalent in the student population (Beck, 2017). Related to this, Stacey et al. (2020) found that the phenomenon of increased workload “blanketed” all schools regardless of school type, location, and socio-economic status and was experienced by all, regardless of work role in the school. These studies highlight that in conjunction with widespread, international documentation of increased workload and work intensification for teachers and school leaders, there is a correspondent concern now that educators do not have capacity to address the very priorities that are central to education (Gavin et al., 2021).

Discussion and conclusion

The review of literature showed that both teacher workload and work intensification are concerns that have been methodically researched and found to have a variety of impacts. These impacts are shown to be detrimental to the health and wellbeing of teachers. Various studies have shown that increased workload and the pressure associated with work intensification generate stress, family conflict for teachers, mental fatigue, burnout, and ultimately, and unsurprisingly, teacher attrition. Perhaps more pernicious, because of the effect experienced by students, is the role that increased workload and/or work intensification has in constraining the capacity of teachers to address the complexities of learning needs in schools today. Here we see evidence in the studies that teachers feel conflicted by the immense pull of non-teaching workload, unable to reconcile this work as beneficial to student need, but having to comply nonetheless. Understanding these impacts suggests that there is an important need for policy intervention in teachers’ work, which in doing so, may arrest problems such as wellbeing, attrition and the challenge of convincing young people that teaching is an attractive career. However, to do this the dimensions of the problem need to be more clearly understood.

As we have outlined above, workload and work intensification are operationalised in the literature in numerous ways. While these terms have been used interchangeably, there is enough evidence to show that they should be understood as distinct trajectories in teachers’ work. There is a methodological difference in gathering evidence about load/intensification as well. Workload is usually generated through quantitative self-report and measured in number of hours. While this may be problematic because of recall inaccuracies (Allen et al., 2021; te Braak et al., 2022) where participants overestimate the time they spend on aspects of their work, our argument is that what is captured through these methods is a distinct aspect of teachers’ work. Work intensification, on the other hand, is a more recent concern and tends to be investigated qualitatively through questions that ask the type of work that teachers do, where their most intense pressure points are and so on. While some studies have utilised quantitative scales to measure types of work and feelings about work (see for example, Green, 2021; Lawrence et al., 2019; Skaalvik, 2020; Van Droogenbroeck et al., 2014), it is clear that what is being uncovered is distinct from workload.

Relatedly, the nature of the phenomena itself can tend to blend workload and work intensification from the perspective of the individual who primarily reports on their feelings or “gist” about the experience of work. As an analytic tool, intensification and load do not have the same qualities or dimensions. Workload is “totality of the tasks to be performed in a job … commonly but inaccurately proxied by working hours” (Green, 2021, p. 399). Work intensification is (as stated above) “the rate of physical and/or mental input to tasks performed during the working day” (Green 2001, in Green, 2021, p. 390) or where employees face “completing more tasks, or taking on extra roles, and thus ‘doing more’ on a day-to-day basis” (Lawrence et al., 2019). Ballet and Kelchtermans (2009, p. 1155) speak of intensification as “more than simply working longer hours, managing an increasing number of diverse tasks, attending more meetings and doing more administrative work and so on”, but also as “a loss of control”. We argue that workload and work intensification are different aspects of the same phenomena. This means that there is a relationship between the two concepts that should be clearly understood and delineated. We posit that this relationship can be explained through the concept of time poverty, a multi-dimensional construct that encapsulates workload, work intensification and how they work together to explain individual experiences of work.

Time poverty is the relationship between (a) the amount of work a teacher does, or perceives that they have to do, and (b) the intensity of that work, which may be expressed as the number, complexity or stakes associated with decisions that need to be made over a given time period. The fact that an increase in one (load or intensity) can lead to an increase in an individual’s feeling of being “out of time” suggests that they are independent concerns. Our argument is that time poverty is becoming a common experience; this plays out in perceptions of an acceleration in job demands and can link to feelings of stress, burnout and dissatisfaction.

Time poverty as the product of the interplay of workload and work intensification encapsulates the experience of work along two different axes or vectors. These function together, but in different ways, to give the subjective accounting of time and work that each individual experiences. Insisting on this distinction reminds systems that, where they have concerns about teachers’ work, they have to intervene in both workload and the “heavy hours” experienced.

To intervene in the problems of teachers’ work, therefore, is to intervene in the problem of time poverty. Too often, proposed recommendations to “solve” the problems of teachers’ work focus on either workload (e.g. regulating the number of hours teachers work and get paid for) or singular aspects of intensity (e.g. removing some of the types of work teachers do, for example, lesson planning) without accounting for overall subjective experiences of what it is to teach. It seems to us that this review of literature has evidenced a dissonance between a teacher being the kind of teacher they want to be, and the type of teacher they have time to be. This is not simply a matter of the time teachers work, or the type of work they do, but how they experience these together, within the working day and beyond.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 When we use the phrase “teachers’ work” we are using it in a generic way to also encapsulate the work of school leaders.

2 Foundation to year 12 refers to the compulsory years of schooling in Australia.