School Connection / Feature
Who governs the 57-hour leadership week?
Working time cannot remain a wellbeing slogan. The STRB has placed clearer expectations on employers and governing bodies while exposing how little leader time is codified.
The answer in brief
Boards govern the risk, but they do not own every cause.
The STRB's 2026 report places governing bodies inside the workload-control system. It recommends annual oversight of directed-time planning and protections for leaders' breaks, weekends and holiday cover. Employers must still organise work, while government determines the statutory and funding framework.1
At the 9 September evidence cutoff, the final 2026 School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document had not been published. Government had said it would retain the 1,265-hour framework and implement greater INSET flexibility and leader protections, but final wording remained subject to consultation and the legal process.2
- Leader working time is less clearly bounded than classroom teachers' directed time.
- STRB proposes a practical board-assurance role covering time plans, breaks, weekends and holiday cover.
- Boards need sufficient time, expertise, information and professional support to provide that assurance credibly.
01 / The workload signal
The 57-hour average is a governance signal, not a verdict on individual schools.
The STRB records average working weeks of 56.5 hours for primary leaders and 57.3 hours for secondary leaders. Primary classroom teachers reported 51.4 hours and secondary teachers 49.3. The figures are self-reported averages, but the distance from ordinary working expectations warrants strategic scrutiny.1
Among respondents considering leaving, 89% cited workload and the same proportion cited stress or poor wellbeing; 76% cited funding. These responses describe association and stated concern rather than a causal ranking. They nevertheless place workforce sustainability firmly within the board's strategic risk discussion.1
02 / Contractual grey space
The working-time architecture leaves substantial professional grey space.
Classroom teachers have 1,265 directed hours across 195 days, alongside the reasonable additional hours needed to discharge professional duties. The STRB says that additional-hours provision is vague, uncapped and largely self-managed. School leaders do not have an equivalent codified working-time limit.1
That ambiguity can turn professional autonomy into an always-available expectation. It also complicates part-time leadership: a nominal fraction may not translate into proportional meetings, parental contact, incidents or accountability deadlines. This is a structural risk, not evidence that any particular board is negligent.1
03 / Practical controls
The STRB proposals move workload from aspiration to assurance.
Recommendations include a plain-English working-time guide, an annual directed-time plan shared with staff, governing-body monitoring and clearer examples for part-time teachers. For leaders, STRB proposes uninterrupted breaks, weekend work limited to exceptional circumstances and holiday cover organised through rotas with board oversight.1
These are more concrete than a generic wellbeing offer. A board can ask whether work is planned, distributed and reviewed without inspecting every individual hour. Government's response supports INSET flexibility and leader protections, but the final statutory and advisory detail must be checked when published.12
04 / Governance capacity
The board's own capacity is part of the workload equation.
NGA said on 3 September that more than 230,000 governors and trustees volunteer across the system while SEND, inclusion and statutory demands expand. It argued that this contribution cannot be taken for granted. That is NGA's first-party sector position, not an official estimate of governance workload.4
Adding one more assurance item to an overloaded agenda will not itself control workload. Boards may need stronger governance-professional support, reliable workforce information, trained committee leadership and sufficient time to challenge operational norms. Governance capacity should be assessed alongside the duties assigned to it.14
05 / Assurance, not surveillance
Monitor organisational patterns rather than individual performance.
A useful report would show planned versus additional hours, meeting load, protected breaks, weekend contact, holiday rotas, PPA disruption, flexible-working requests, sickness and turnover. It should separate recurring design problems from exceptional incidents and exclude personal diary detail.1
The latest workforce data shows teacher sickness absence remains elevated compared with the pre-pandemic period, but that release cannot attribute absence to workload. Boards should examine their own trend alongside anonymous qualitative evidence while maintaining medical confidentiality and avoiding causal claims.3
Leadership questions
Questions that turn the development into a governing conversation.
Board test
What work routinely sits outside planned or contracted time, and why?
Board test
Are evenings, weekends and holidays genuinely exceptional for leaders?
Board test
Do part-time and flexible leadership arrangements reduce responsibilities proportionately?
Board test
Does the board have the data and professional support to challenge workload safely?
School Connection intelligence lens
What the national Observatory can add, and where it must stop.
Observatory test: run anonymous 14-day time diaries twice yearly – one ordinary fortnight and one known pressure point – for heads, deputies and assistant heads. Code hours by teaching, operational incidents, meetings, administration, accountability, parental contact and out-of-hours work. Pair these with directed-time plans, weekend-contact rules, holiday rotas, board scrutiny frequency, governance-professional hours, sickness, flexible-working outcomes and 12-month retention.134
Report medians, distributions and within-school change by phase, school size, deprivation, SEND and governance type. Suppress small cells and test associations only. Do not infer that a board practice, funding level or working-time pattern caused sickness, departure or retention without a suitable longitudinal design and counterfactual.13
Only human-approved, public-safe intelligence can appear here. Private candidates, commercial signals, contacts, opportunity values and internal scores are never exposed through School Connection.
Evidence boundary
What this analysis does not prove.
- Public-safe boundary: participation in any workload study must be voluntary, anonymised and reported in sufficiently large groups.
- Public-safe boundary: time diaries must not expose safeguarding incidents, health information or identifiable staff.
- Public-safe boundary: working hours are not a productivity score and must not be used to rank individual leaders or boards.
- Evidence limitation: self-reported hours are vulnerable to recall, interpretation and selection effects.
- Evidence limitation: annual averages conceal term, inspection, examination and incident-related peaks.
- Evidence limitation: cross-sectional links between workload, governance practice, absence and departure intentions do not establish causation.
What we are monitoring next
Publication is the beginning of the watch.
- The final 2026 School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document and associated working-time guidance.
- NGA's 2026 Annual Governance Survey results and any measures of board capacity or workload.
- DfE's autumn 2026 retention programme, including leader-specific participation and evaluation evidence.
Approved public intelligence
What the live evidence is showing now.
School Connection continues to monitor workforce, leadership & capacity evidence. New machine-detected signals remain private editorial candidates until a human editor investigates and approves them for publication.
This panel reads only the editor-approved School Connection public feed. It never exposes raw Observatory records, private candidates, contacts, commercial opportunities or internal scores.
Sources and methodology
Evidence used in this analysis
School Connection links to the primary source behind each material claim. Source status, period and limitations are stated so readers can reproduce the evidence trail.
- 01
School Teachers' Review Body and Department for Education · Published 1 July 2026
School Teachers' Review Body 36th report: 2026
Authoritative evidence and recommendations on reported working hours, directed time, part-time working, governing-body monitoring and protections for school leaders. - 02
Department for Education · Published 1 July 2026
Teacher Pay and Conditions: written statement HCWS171
Primary statement of the government's response to the STRB report, including its intention to retain the 1,265-hour framework and implement greater INSET flexibility and leader protections. - 03
Department for Education · Published 4 June 2026; updated 17 August 2026
School workforce in England, reporting year 2025
Primary official statistics for teacher sickness absence, retention and wider workforce context. The release does not establish causes of absence or departure. - 04
National Governance Association · Published 3 September 2026
Welcome back: leading with purpose in a year of change
First-party sector position on the demands facing England's volunteer governors and trustees. It is not an official workload estimate.