'Audit culture' causing staff burnout in schools, report finds

The Department for Education has pledged to ease pressures on teachers in England, after it accepted the recommendations of a new report that said an “audit culture” in schools was causing anxiety and staff burnout without improving results.

The report by the DfE’s teacher workload advisory group says teachers have to waste time producing data on their pupils, with the recording, monitoring and analysing of data being demanded by multiple sources, including local and central government, Ofsted school inspectors and multiple tiers of school management.

In some cases teachers are expected to report on up to 30 different elements of data for 30 children in a class, which the report described as an attempt to provide “spurious precision” in tracking pupil attainment.

The workload of teachers in England is among the highest in the world according to international surveys, and is often cited as a cause of experienced teachers leaving the profession.

Prof Becky Allen of the UCL Institute of Education, who chaired the advisory group, said the collection of data by schools has led to unsustainable workload and stress for many teachers.

Allen said the advisory group found “widespread data practices that don’t help pupil progress but do increase teacher workload. I hope that the principles and advice we have provided for schools will help them to question their current practice to change this.”

The report recommends that the DfE should not request regular attainment data from schools other than its statutory requirements, while Ofsted inspectors should examine if a school’s data collections are efficient.

In its response, the DfE said it “accepts all of the recommendations in this report in full. We have acknowledged that data management is a cause of unnecessary workload in schools.”

Damian Hinds, the education secretary, signalled his commitment by signing a joint letter alongside Amanda Spielman, the head of Ofsted, as well as leaders of the Association of School and College Leaders and the National Association of Head Teachers.

The letter, to be sent to every school leader in England, has “a straightforward message” that headteachers and managers who want to cut back on unnecessary workload will be supported. “None of us wants staff in schools to feel like they are drowning in unnecessary and meaningless data,” the letter states.

Tackling excessive workload is a key plank in the government’s drive to improve teacher retention. But it came under attack from Labour for continuing cuts to school budgets, including a failure to fully fund the recent pay rise awarded to teachers.

Labour said analysis of research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies revealed that annual spending on schools would be £1.7bn higher in 2019-20 if funding per pupil had been maintained in real terms since 2015.

Angela Rayner, Labour’s shadow education secretary, said the cuts made a mockery of chancellor Philip Hammond’s “little extra” for schools in the recent budget.

“Instead of offering a sticking plaster to schools this government should be genuinely investing in them, reversing their unjustifiable cuts,” Rayner said.