1st Edition

Teaching and Time Poverty Understanding Workload and Work Intensification in Schools

Edited By Greg Thompson, Anna Hogan Copyright 2025
242 Pages 8 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

242 Pages 8 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

242 Pages 8 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

As teacher shortages reach a global crisis point, this book explores how time poverty has become a critical factor in the working lives of teachers and school leaders. Arguing that we need to move away from framing the problem of teachers’ work as simply workload, this book suggests that understanding time poverty is the first step in moving toward more manageable working lives. The book brings... Read more

Time Poverty in Teachers’ Work

1. Why Policy Struggles to Respond to the Crisis of Teachers’ Time Poverty

2. Performative-Accountability and Time-Poverty

3. The Job Quality of Britain’s Teachers Before and After the Pandemic

4. Time, Gearing, and Impoverished Welfare in Primary Schools: How an Overheated Public sector Enrols Teachers in Toxic Social Debt

5. Embodied Time Poverty: A New Conceptualisation of Principals’ Experiences of Work Intensification, Workload, and Work Complexity

6. Core or Non-core task? Four Types of School Leaders’ Approaches to Communication Management

7. Secondary Teachers’ Timetables, Time Poverty and Attrition

8. Dissecting the Effects of Workload and Work Intensification on Teacher Job Satisfaction: A Time-Diary Approach to Teachers’ Working Time Allocation

9. Boundary Work as an Interpretative Framework for Understanding Time Poverty: Contestations over Legitimacy and Identity in Teachers’ Work

10. Professional Time and Teacher Autonomy: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

11. The Time Poor Teacher: Understanding the Intensity of Decision-Making

12. Marking and Time Poverty: A Case Study of a Workload Reduction Initiative in an English Primary School

Beyond Workload

Biography

Greg Thompson is a Professor of Education Research at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia. His research focuses on educational theory, education policy and the philosophy/sociology of education assessment, accountability and measurement.

Anna Hogan is an ARC DECRA Research Fellow in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia. Her research interests broadly focus on education policy and practice.