How Much Time Do Teachers Spend Planning? The Real Numbers

I’ve been teaching for over twenty years. In all that time, I’ve never once finished my planning during school hours. Not once.

That’s not a boast. It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s a systemic failure that the profession has somehow normalised, and it’s one of the reasons I started building ClickTeach.

But let’s not rely on anecdotes. Let’s look at the actual numbers.

The DfE’s Own Figures Tell the Story

The Department for Education’s Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders survey paints a picture that won’t surprise any teacher reading this, but it should alarm everyone else.

In 2025, full-time primary teachers worked an average of 51.4 hours per week. Secondary teachers averaged 49.3 hours. School leaders clocked 56.5 hours.

The directed time budget for a teacher in England is 32.5 hours per week. That means primary teachers are working, on average, nearly 19 hours per week beyond their contracted time. That’s not overtime you get paid for. That’s just expected.

To put it another way: half the teaching workforce is working an extra unpaid day every single week.

Where Does All That Time Go?

Teaching itself accounts for about 23.5 hours per week for primary teachers. The rest, the other 28 or so hours, is everything else: planning, marking, data entry, displays, reports, admin, emails, meetings.

The UCL Institute of Education and TALIS data breaks this down further. Teachers spend roughly 8 hours per week on marking and 6 hours per week on planning and preparation. That’s 14 hours a week on two tasks alone.

And that 6 hours of planning? It’s conservative. Anyone who teaches EYFS or Reception knows that planning continuous provision across seven areas of learning, tracking individual children, preparing enhancements, and resourcing activities takes far longer than a few hours.

Only 3% Can Work Within Contracted Hours

This is the statistic that floored me when I first read it in the 2026 Teacher Wellbeing Report. Only 3% of teachers say they can complete their work within contracted hours.

Three percent.

If 97% of workers in any other profession said they couldn’t do their job within contracted hours, there would be a national outcry. In teaching, it’s Tuesday.

The same report found that 71% of teachers describe their workload as “unmanageable.” That figure was up from 61% in 2024. Among primary teachers specifically, 53% said unmanageable.

It’s Not Just Hours. It’s Evenings and Weekends.

The hours are bad enough. But it’s when those hours fall that causes the real damage.

62% of teachers regularly work evenings. 55% work weekends. A third frequently cancel plans with family and friends to manage workload. 75% say they can’t switch off from work-related thoughts at home, with 41% saying they never switch off.

If you’re a teacher reading this on a Sunday evening with your laptop open and your lesson plans half-finished, you’re not alone. You’re in the majority.

What This Costs the Profession

The retention figures speak for themselves. 29% of teachers are considering leaving the profession within the next 12 months. Almost 10% of English teachers left in the most recent year of analysis. The five-year retention rate for newly qualified teachers has dropped to around 57%, meaning nearly half of new teachers leave within five years of qualifying.

When they leave, it costs schools an estimated £30,000+ per teacher to recruit, train, and replace. The government spent £700 million on recruitment and retention initiatives in 2024-25 alone. These aren’t small numbers.

And the number one reason teachers give for leaving? Workload. Not pay. Not behaviour. Not Ofsted. Workload.

We’re not talking about people who couldn’t hack it. We’re talking about talented, committed professionals who love teaching but can’t sustain the hours. Every one who leaves takes years of expertise, relationships with families, and institutional knowledge with them. That loss is felt by colleagues, by children, and by the communities those schools serve.

Planning Is the Bit We Can Actually Fix

Here’s what frustrates me most. Teachers can’t reduce the hours they spend in the classroom. They can’t skip parents’ evenings. They can’t ignore safeguarding responsibilities. Most of what fills a teacher’s day is non-negotiable.

But planning? The hours spent searching for resources, adapting materials that aren’t quite right, creating things from scratch because nothing you’ve found is good enough? That’s fixable.

If a teacher spends 6 hours per week on planning and preparation, and even half of that time could be reclaimed with genuinely high-quality, curriculum-mapped, ready-to-use resources, that’s 3 hours back every week. Over a school year, that’s roughly 120 hours. Three full working weeks.

That’s three weeks of your life. Evenings with your family. Saturday mornings not spent at the dining room table with a laminator. Sunday nights without the dread.

Why Existing Platforms Haven’t Solved This

If the solution were simply “more resources,” the problem would be solved by now. There are platforms with over a million resources available. Teachers still work 51.4 hours a week.

The problem isn’t volume. It’s quality and fit. Teachers report spending 4+ hours adapting downloaded resources because they don’t match the curriculum properly, contain errors, or don’t reflect the practice standard they want in their classroom. The time “saved” by downloading gets eaten up by editing.

What teachers actually need is fewer, better resources. Ones created by someone who understands what Outstanding-rated practice looks like, because they’ve delivered it. Ones that are curriculum-mapped, differentiated, and genuinely ready to use.

What I’m Building

ClickTeach is my attempt to give teachers their planning time back. Every resource comes from over twenty years of EYFS and primary experience, including multiple Ofsted Outstanding ratings. They’re UK-curriculum aligned, differentiated, and designed to work straight out of the download. No editing. No adapting. No compromising on quality because you’ve run out of time.

The Sunday Saver feature sends a curated pack of resources every Sunday at 6pm. Your week, planned, before the Sunday scaries even start.

I’m building this because I’ve lived those 51.4-hour weeks. I’m still living them. And I believe that if I create these resources once, properly, thousands of teachers won’t have to.

If you want to be among the first to try it, register your interest here. No commitment, no spam. Just a heads-up when we’re ready.