Schools
The school office week
The repeated work in a school is not teaching. It is the absence line, the letters, the consent slips, the club bookings, the returns and the board pack, and almost all of it lands on two or three people.
What the week is actually made of #
A school office runs on a fixed daily shape and a rolling annual one.
The daily shape starts before eight: cover for whoever has called in sick, the register, then the absence line and the calls out to every family who has not explained a missing child. The rest of the day is interruption work, front desk, phone, gate, medical, plus whatever the term calendar has landed on that week.
The annual shape is the census, the admissions round, the trips, the clubs, the free school meal checks, the safer recruitment files and the governors. None of that is a small job done occasionally.
66%
Of teachers spend over half their working time on tasks other than teaching
DfE, 11 April 2023, 11,177 responses
77%
The same figure in secondary
DfE, 11 April 2023
75%
Named general administrative work as taking up too much of their time
DfE, 11 April 2023
General administrative work was the task most often named, and data recording, inputting and analysis came next at 53 per cent. Separate DfE research published in July 2023 found participating teachers and middle leaders reporting an average of two hours a day on administration, in both primary and secondary.
Which parts run on rules #
The government has already published its own answer. The Workload Reduction Taskforce's initial recommendations of January 2024 include a list of 23 administrative tasks that should not require a teacher, and the list reads like a table of contents for this section.
Eight of the 23 tasks that should not require a teacher
- Re-entering data into multiple systems
- Bulk communications to parents
- Administration of school visits and trips
- Collecting money from parents
- Administration of cover for absent teachers
- Producing analyses of attendance figures
- Investigating a pupil's absence
- Administration relating to wraparound care
That is a list of jobs with a fixed trigger, a fixed set of steps and a fixed output. Which is exactly the shape of work that runs on rules. The pages below take one of them each, say what it really involves in a school year, and mark where the rules stop and judgement has to take over. They do not tell you what to buy.
The two things that are different about schools #
First, everything here is personal data about children. The Information Commissioner's Office treats children's data as meriting specific protection, and the school remains the data controller for it no matter who is holding the keyboard. Any supplier is a processor acting on the school's instructions, and the school stays accountable.
Second, a school is not a business with a slow month. The absence line does not care that it is census week. The work arrives in fixed peaks against a fixed calendar, which is why the honest measure here is not hours saved in the abstract but how many of those peaks still need a person sitting at a desk keying things in.
If you want that number for your own office, the free tools count it from your figures, and the audit counts it from your actual week.
Schools
The school office: absence lines, letters, forms, bookings and reporting.
- First day absence calls What the absence line costs a school office every morning, and where the rules end
- Letters and parent communication Why bulk communication with parents eats a day a week, and which part of it is rules
- Trip consent and payments Chasing consent slips and money for one trip, and what the DfE actually requires
- Clubs and wraparound bookings Breakfast club, after school club and holiday club bookings, and where they go wrong
- Free school meals and pupil premium The eligibility, registration and reporting work behind FSM, and what changed in 2026
- Attendance returns and reporting Daily attendance sharing, the census and the reports, and which of them are automatic
- Safer recruitment paperwork The checks behind one appointment, the single central record, and what cannot be automated
- SEN paperwork Where the SENCO day goes, the statutory clocks behind it, and the part that needs a person
- Governor and compliance reporting The sixteen things a school must publish, the board pack, and what inspection really needs
- Cover for absent teachers The half hour before seven that decides the school day, and which parts of it are rules
Where these numbers come from
- DfE and IFF Research, Working lives of teachers and leaders, wave 1 core report , read 19 September 2026 . Published 11 April 2023, 11,177 responses, fieldwork spring 2022. Source of the 66, 77 and 75 per cent figures
- DfE and CooperGibson Research, Exploring teachers’ admin time , read 19 September 2026 . Published 20 July 2023. Qualitative research. Source of the two hours a day figure
- DfE, Workload reduction taskforce: initial recommendations , read 19 September 2026 . January 2024. Annex X lists 23 administrative tasks that should not fall to a teacher
Last checked 19 September 2026.
Our workings are on the methodology page .
Free audit
A free audit for schools
One call, walking through a normal week. You get the tracker of every repeated job ranked by hours, a map of the top five, and the number of hours a month they could give back. Yours to keep either way.