The Sunday Scaries: Why Teachers Dread Sunday Evenings (And What Would Actually Help)
It’s 5pm on a Sunday. You’ve been “just going to do an hour of planning” since 2pm. The laptop’s on the kitchen table. The washing up isn’t done. You’ve got three tabs open with resources that are almost right but not quite. Your partner has stopped asking when you’ll be finished because the answer is always “soon” and it never is.
The knot in your stomach isn’t about Monday itself. It’s about the gap between what you want to deliver and what you’ve had time to prepare. It’s the knowledge that you’ll walk into your classroom tomorrow and have to make it work regardless.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. And it has a name.
The Sunday Scaries Are a Recognised Phenomenon
The term “Sunday scaries” has become common in teaching circles, but the feeling it describes has been around for as long as teachers have been expected to plan in their own time. It’s that creeping anxiety on Sunday afternoon, the dread that builds as the evening goes on, the mental load that means you never truly have a full weekend off.
The data backs it up. According to DfE surveys, 55% of teachers regularly work weekends. 62% work evenings. A third frequently cancel personal plans because of workload. And 75% say they can’t switch off from work-related thoughts at home.
This isn’t a character flaw or a time management problem. It’s structural. The job, as currently designed, cannot be done within contracted hours. The DfE’s own data shows that only 3% of teachers manage to work within their directed time.
What Sunday Evening Actually Looks Like
I’ve been teaching for over twenty years. I can describe a typical Sunday evening with my eyes closed, because they’ve nearly all been the same.
You sit down intending to plan the week. You know roughly what you’re covering. But you need resources. So you search. And search. You find something that’s almost right but needs adapting. You download it, open it, realise the font is wrong, the curriculum references don’t match, or it assumes children are further ahead than yours are. You either spend 45 minutes fixing it or start from scratch.
By 8pm you’ve planned Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday to Friday are “we’ll work it out.” You close the laptop feeling like you haven’t done enough, knowing you’ll be scrambling by Wednesday afternoon, already dreading next Sunday when you do it all again.
The cruelest part? The better teacher you are, the worse this feels. Teachers who don’t care about quality don’t get the Sunday scaries. The ones who lose their evenings are the ones who care most.
The Real Cost
To Your Health
Teacher wellbeing scores sit significantly below the general population average. 86% of teachers report experiencing stress at work. Higher stress levels are particularly concentrated among primary teachers (65%) and younger teachers in their twenties and thirties (65%). 73% say their workplace doesn’t offer any wellbeing support. 64% say their school has no measures to manage stress and burnout.
The Sunday scaries aren’t just unpleasant. They represent chronic, weekly stress that compounds over months and years. That has real health consequences.
To Your Relationships
When 36% of teachers regularly cancel plans with family and friends because of workload, the damage extends beyond the individual. Partners and children experience the distraction, the closed laptop that’s always open, the parent who’s there but not really there.
I’ve heard colleagues say their children associate Sunday afternoons with “Mummy’s working.” That’s not a professional inconvenience. That’s a life cost.
To the Profession
29% of teachers are considering leaving within 12 months. Workload is consistently the number one reason cited. The five-year retention rate for newly qualified teachers has dropped to roughly 57%.
The profession is haemorrhaging talent, and the Sunday scaries are a symptom of exactly why. You can love teaching, love the children, love the job itself, and still reach a point where the hours make it unsustainable.
What Doesn’t Help
Let’s be honest about the solutions that get offered and why they fall short.
“Set boundaries”
Helpful in theory. In practice, if you don’t plan on Sunday evening, you walk into Monday unprepared. The work doesn’t disappear because you’ve decided not to do it. Setting boundaries only works if the workload fits within those boundaries, and the data tells us it doesn’t.
“Use ready-made resources”
This is the right instinct, but the execution has been poor. Platforms with hundreds of thousands of resources should solve this problem. The reason they don’t is that most of those resources need significant adaptation before they’re classroom-ready. You replace “making from scratch” with “searching, downloading, and editing,” which often takes just as long.
“Wellbeing initiatives”
Yoga in the staffroom. Resilience workshops. Pizza Fridays. These are nice gestures, and they mean well. But they treat the symptom, not the cause. The cause is too much work and not enough time. No amount of mindfulness can compensate for a 51-hour working week.
“Be more efficient”
This one implies the problem is the teacher’s fault. It isn’t. When 97% of the workforce can’t do the job in contracted hours, the system is broken, not the individuals within it.
What Would Actually Help
I’ve thought about this a lot. Not just as a teacher experiencing it, but as someone building a platform specifically to address it. Here’s what I believe would make a genuine difference:
Resources That Don’t Need Editing
This is the single biggest time win available. If every resource you downloaded was curriculum-mapped, properly differentiated, UK-English throughout, and genuinely ready to print and use, the hours spent adapting would evaporate. That requires resources made by someone who understands what classroom-ready actually means, because they’ve been there.
Curation Over Volume
The time spent searching is wasted time. If someone who knows the curriculum, knows what good EYFS practice looks like, and knows what works in a real classroom has already selected and organised the best resources for your week, you can skip the search entirely.
Proactive Delivery
Instead of you going to find resources on Sunday evening, what if they came to you? A curated pack, matched to what you’re teaching that week, delivered to your inbox before the Sunday scaries even start?
That’s the idea behind the Sunday Saver. Every Sunday at 6pm, subscribers receive a curated pack of resources for the coming week. Five resources, curriculum-mapped, differentiated, ready to download and use. Your week planned before you’ve finished your cup of tea.
I chose 6pm deliberately. That’s the time when the dread typically kicks in. Instead of opening your laptop to an empty planning template, you open your inbox to a week’s worth of resources already sorted.
Genuine Time Savings
If you currently spend 6 hours a week on planning and preparation, and the right resources could halve that, you’d reclaim 3 hours every week. That’s 3 hours back with your family. 3 hours of your weekend returned. Over a school year, roughly 120 hours. Three full working weeks of your life.
That’s the calculation that drives everything I’m building. Not more resources. More time.
Why I’m Building ClickTeach
I’m building ClickTeach because I’ve spent twenty years living the Sunday scaries. I know what it feels like to choose between preparing properly and being present with my family. I know the guilt of using a resource that isn’t quite right because there wasn’t time to find a better one.
I also know what Outstanding-rated resources look like, because I’ve made them for my own classroom across multiple settings that achieved that rating. The plan is to create them once, properly, so that thousands of teachers don’t have to.
ClickTeach isn’t ready yet. I’m still building the library, still teaching full-time, still experiencing the very problem I’m trying to solve. But it’s coming.
If you want to be the first to know when it launches, and if you want your Sunday evenings back, register your interest here. No commitment. Just a message when we’re ready to give you your Sundays back.
You deserve a full weekend. Every teacher does.
