Systems, unions, and school communities are confronting significant issues with teachers and their work. Concerns around teachers’ workload and work intensification appear to be impacting the attractiveness of teaching as a career for current teachers and for young people considering teaching as a career. Importantly, this seems to be a global concern as many jurisdictions report that it is increasingly difficult to recruit principals, experienced teachers are leaving the profession and teaching is perceived by young people as having low appeal as a career (te Braak et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2018; Spicksley, 2022; Skaalvik, 2020). Stress, burnout, and job dissatisfaction appear to be on the increase, at the same time as there is a perceived decline in the status of teaching. Understanding the direct factors at work in this phenomenon remains a methodological challenge. Social acceleration, manifest in perceptions that that there is no longer ‘enough time’, appear to be increasing in many societies across a range of occupations (Rosa, 2010, 2013). However, as Wacjman (2008) has argued, while many people perceive that the pace of their life has increased, there is little empirical evidence that we now have less time than in the past, and a challenge remains for researchers to engage with this as an empirical problem. 

Our approach in this paper is first, to explore existing empirical research on teacher workload and work intensification with a particular emphasis on how these ideas are being operationalised. Second, through a systematic review of that literature we look at how, if at all, workload and work intensification are being theorised as related aspects of teachers’ work. Third, we introduce the concept of ‘time poverty’ to posit the relationship between workload and work intensification, and our resultant strategy for empirically investigating the time poverty of teachers and school leaders. Finally, we report on our findings from our pilot study of 136 participants that evaluated the feasibility and preliminary outcomes of a novel, purpose-built app that uses a ‘patchwork’ data set to characterise teacher time use in real time. The Teacher Time Use app was designed with a commercial app developer through an iterative development process. Participants were recruited to a nonrandomized, single-arm trial of the Teacher Time Use app. All participants were asked to track their time use across three 30-minute time periods (randomly assigned by the app) on three different days. All participants were also asked to complete a ‘start of day’ survey and an ‘end of day’ survey on each of these three days. Data used in this pilot study include data directly entered by participants into the app and app data analytics.

This research has implications for how we understand teachers’ experiences of disillusionment and demoralisation within their jobs and what might be done to address this. To intervene in the problems of teachers’ work there is a need 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 work intensification (e.g., removing some of the types of work teachers do, for example lesson planning) without accounting for the subjective experiences of teachers. While our pilot study used only a small sample of teachers, broad analysis of this data evidence 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.

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