Education systems around the globe are experiencing shortages of teachers (Welch, 2022). While the causes of such shortages are many, one contributing factor has been identified as teachers’ working conditions and in particular their workload (Heffernan et al., 2022). Concerns about the volume and scope of teachers’ work are international, with reports of work overload appearing in, for example, countries including England (2019), Germany (Kreuzfeld et al., 2022), and France (Huyghebaert et al., 2018). In Australia, these discussions have included a focus on the ‘administrative’ work undertaken by teachers, which is relatively high when compared internationally (Thomson & Hillman, 2020). These concerns have been followed up in NSW state education policy, for example, with suggestions to reduce teachers’ time in lesson planning. However, such suggestions have been critiqued for the way in which they have positioned lesson planning as ‘administrative’ work, and therefore not ‘core’ to the work of teaching (Wilson et al., 2022). This policy response, and subsequent controversy, is emblematic of the contested nature of teachers’ work around the world, and what is, and is not, ‘core’ to the profession today.  

It is within this context that we present this paper, which aims to consider how teachers’ ‘core work’ may be defined. We draw on literature exploring the nature of teachers’ working conditions and intensification (e.g. Fitzgerald et al., 2019), alongside conceptualisations of ‘good teaching’ in both research (e.g. Llopart & Esteban-Guitart, 2017) and policy (e.g. Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2014). Using this framing, we develop a conceptual matrix for how ‘core work’ might be defined, as an ever-evolving combination of work undertaken and valued by the profession, tested against the research literature and considered in light of policy objectives. What is missing from this equation, however, is robust empirical evidence of what teachers do and what they value in what they do. We theorise that both teachers’ frequency and valuing of different activities must be taken into account in order to support a form of occupational professionalism (Evetts, 2009) that is meaningful to teachers and which supports workforce retention. It is here that we contribute, providing large-scale data to document the work that teachers actually do.  

To do this, we provide an analysis of a large-scale, detailed quantitative investigation of the nature of teachers’ work, in particular the activities they undertake on a daily, weekly, and less-than-weekly basis, and whether or not they value these activities as important/necessary. The research questions for the paper are:

1. What do teachers do on a daily, weekly, and less-than-weekly basis?
2. To what degree do they perceive this work to be important/necessary?

By answering these questions using the empirical data gathered and which delineates what teachers in NSW, Australia ‘do’ in their work, and what they do and do not value about this work, we aim to explicate our proposed conceptualisation of teachers’ ‘core work’. The analysis thus developed will therefore provide important grounding for how ‘core work’ in teaching might be defined, and supported, in policy moving forward - both in Australia and elsewhere.

This paper reports upon a large questionnaire survey conducted with members of the NSW Teachers Federation in 2018. Responses from 18,234 out of 54,202 union members constituted a response rate of 33.6%. The survey was designed in consultation with the union in response to membership concerns about workload. The questionnaire as a whole explored: (a) the teaching, learning and other activities currently undertaken in schools; (b) how these different kinds of work were evaluated by teachers; (c) how work (nature and quantum) was perceived to have changed over the past five years; (d) the effects of these changes; and (e) actions or strategies that might be taken to support work in schools. Previous publications include a high-level report to the union (McGrath-Champ et al., 2018), and a more in-depth exploration of (c) and (d) (Stacey et al., 2023). In this presentation, we provide a more fulsome analysis of (a) and (b), disaggregating the data beyond what was previously provided to the union (McGrath-Champ et al., 2018) to enable a closer focus on the work of primary and secondary teachers, excluding school leaders to drill down specifically into classroom teachers’ work. Data reported on in this paper are primarily quantitative, consisting of a checklist of activity items, devised through examination of similar surveys (e.g. Weldon & Ingvarson, 2016) and consultation regarding union needs. Respondents identified whether they undertook each activity daily, weekly, or less-than-weekly. This same checklist was then reviewed by respondents with each item assessed as ‘important/necessary’, or not. Descriptive statistics are used to present a profile of teachers’ work and how they value this work, broken down into primary and secondary categories. Activities were also put through a semantic coding process to ascertain the nature of teachers’ daily, and other, work; as well as that which they do and do not value.

In this paper we present an extensive mapping of teachers’ work. We find minor differences in the work undertaken by primary and secondary teachers, for instance in the areas of marking, and communicating with parents. However, mostly the work that primary and secondary teachers undertake is very similar, with semantic coding revealing that large proportions of both primary and secondary teachers report work concerned with, in particular, preparing for the classroom, and managing student welfare, on a daily basis. However, work activity frequency and value did not always align. Some activities – such as playground duty – are undertaken very frequently, but not rated as very important. Playground duty may be viewed as an example of institutional work (Comber, 2006), supporting classroom work but not seen as important in and of itself. However, we also explore the possibility that some work, especially that which is valued the least, is done not because it is viewed as important either directly or in a secondary sense, but because it is required, with the work teachers value the least that which is semantically coded as ‘responding to and implementing policy’. This theme, of administrative and data collection work that is lowly valued, reflects research on external accountability pressures (Holloway et al., 2017; Verger & Parcerisa, 2017). Through this analysis, we make two contributions. First, we present a large-scale and detailed mapping of what it actually is that teachers do on a day-to-day, and less than daily basis.. Second, we propose a conceptual frame for delineating teachers’ ‘core work’ across axes of frequency, value, research and policy. As such, we provide both an empirical and conceptual foundation for any policy action which may seek to support teachers’ work moving forward, while also raising questions to provoke further research in the field.

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