Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to help reduce the workload of teachers.

Teacher and leader workload is unacceptably high. This is why the department is committed to working with the sector to eliminate unnecessary workload.

We know that reducing teacher workload will play a key role in recruiting and retaining excellent school staff and will support the government’s mission to transform the education system so that all children and young people get the skills, care and opportunities they deserve.

Work is underway across the department to help reduce burdens, including through the reform of accountability, curriculum and assessment and the special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) system and through the government’s child poverty taskforce.

We are working with the sector to identify where we can go further to address unnecessary workload, including through the Improving Education Together agreement.

Our ‘Improve workload and wellbeing for school staff’ service, developed alongside school leaders, contains a range of supportive resources for schools to review and reduce workload, and improve staff wellbeing.

The department worked in partnership with the education sector and mental health experts to develop the Education Staff Wellbeing Charter.

The charter sets out commitments from the department, Ofsted, and schools and colleges to protect and promote the wellbeing of staff, including an explicit commitment to continue to support schools to drive down unnecessary workload. Over 4,000 schools and colleges have signed up to the charter.

In addition, we are working with a group of colleges to pilot a suite of funding and audit simplifications to make the system more efficient and less bureaucratic to support the further education (FE) workforce to reduce burdens. We have given these colleges more flexibility by reducing FE funding rules, simplifying funding calculations, and removing some individual ringfences within adult skills funding and 16-19 funding. We are testing how we can make audit and assurance processes simpler, make it easier for colleges to deliver Skills Bootcamps, and are testing improvements to apprenticeships.