Teacher administrative workload: how to lighten it

A teacher spending evenings copying out grades, an office assistant writing receipts by hand, a head teacher chasing late payers by phone: paperwork eats into the time a school should devote to its students. The good news is that much of this burden can be reduced without hiring anyone. Here is how to identify the tasks to lighten and what can realistically be automated.

Administrative workload: a matter of quality and retention

The OECD’s TALIS 2024 survey, published in October 2025 and conducted in 55 education systems, gives a precise measure of the problem. Lower secondary teachers report working 41 hours a week on average, including 23 hours of classroom teaching. The rest is split between preparation, marking, communication with families and administrative tasks.

It is this last category that weighs most on morale. According to the OECD, about half of teachers cite excessive administrative work as a source of stress, and Education International points out that it is mentioned more often than maintaining classroom discipline (52% versus 45%). South Africa, which takes part in the survey, stands out: its teachers spend almost five hours a week on administrative work, compared with under three hours on average across the OECD.

The stakes go beyond comfort. According to UNESCO’s Global Report on Teachers (2024), sub-Saharan Africa will need 15 million new teachers by 2030, and the attrition rate of primary teachers worldwide almost doubled between 2015 and 2022. Giving time back to staff also helps them stay.

Where the time goes: the heaviest tasks

For teachers

• Taking the register on paper, then passing it on to the office.
• Calculating averages and weightings, often redone by hand or in a personal spreadsheet.
• Copying grades from a notebook to a register, then onto the report card.
• Answering the same questions from parents about absences or results, again and again.

For the office and leadership

• Writing receipts and tracking tuition fee balances.
• Chasing unpaid fees, one family at a time.
• Searching paper files for a certificate or a transfer.
• Updating class lists and timetables after every change.

What all these tasks have in common: the same information is entered several times, by several people, in several places. That is where the quickest gains lie.

Four principles for lasting relief

1. Enter data once: a grade, an absence or a payment recorded at the source should automatically feed the report card, the alert or the receipt.
2. Let the person who holds the information record it: the teacher takes the register on a phone, instead of handing over a sheet that the office types up again.
3. Standardise documents: one report card, receipt and reminder template approved once and for all, rather than a document rebuilt every time.
4. Remove before you automate: some tables and reports are no longer read by anyone. Better to drop them than to digitise them.

What about artificial intelligence? TALIS 2024 shows that more than a third of teachers across the OECD already use it in their work, mainly to prepare lessons and activities, far less for marking. It can help draft a message or a lesson plan, but it does not replace reliable, well-organised school data: that comes first.

Checklist: a two-week time audit

• Ask three teachers and the office team to log, for two weeks, the administrative tasks they carry out and how long they take.
• Group the tasks by type: register, grades, report cards, fees, communication with families, documents.
• Spot duplicate entries and information copied from one medium to another.
• Sort the tasks: remove, simplify, automate.
• Pick a single task to automate first, the one that saves the most time for the most people.
• Measure again three months later and share the results with staff.

For rolling out a management tool itself, from listing your registers to training staff, see our guide to digitising school management.

How SciAut Educ helps

SciAut Educ tackles duplicate entry head-on, task by task:

• Paper registers: the register is taken in class on a phone, justifications are attached and parents are alerted, without going through the office.
• Averages and report cards: grades are entered once, averages and weightings are calculated, and PDF report cards come out in the school’s colours.
• Receipts and reminders: payment schedules, receipts, reminders and balances per student are kept in one place.
• Searching for files: the student record brings together legal guardians, documents and school history.
• Class lists and timetables: enrolment, re-enrolment and class allocation feed the timetable for each class.

Office staff, the bursar and teachers work on the same data instead of passing it to one another.

Conclusion

Reducing administrative workload does not require a revolution: measure where the time goes, cut what is useless, then automate duplicate entry. Every hour given back to teachers is an hour for students. Discover SciAut Educ or book a demo.

Sources

• Education GPS: Teachers and teaching conditions (TALIS 2024), OECD, 2025
• Singapore teachers embrace digital technologies (TALIS 2024 results and OECD averages), Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2025
• Using artificial intelligence: takeaways from TALIS 2024, Education International, 2025
• Global report on teachers: what you need to know, UNESCO, 2024