What the OECD's teacher survey says about workload

What TALIS is

The Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) is run by the OECD. It asks teachers and principals about their working conditions, training, wellbeing and practice, and the questions are kept largely the same each round so countries can be compared over time. The 2024 survey was published as Results from TALIS 2024: The State of Teaching on 7 October 2025. The headline figures below are OECD averages for lower secondary teachers.

The week, in hours

Across OECD systems, lower secondary teachers report working about 41 hours a week, of which about 22.7 hours are spent teaching. The rest goes on planning, marking, meetings, talking to families and administration. General administrative work alone takes around three hours a week on average.

Those averages hide wide differences between countries, but the shape is familiar to anyone who runs a school: barely half of a teacher's week is spent in front of a class.

Paperwork is a leading source of stress

About half of teachers across OECD systems name "too much administrative work" as a source of stress at work. The Australian Council for Educational Research, which ran Australia's part of the survey, puts the OECD average at 52%.

About half of teachers say paperwork is a source of stress. It is the part of the job a school can most directly change.

Several countries also report that stress has risen since the previous survey in 2018. Classroom discipline, curriculum change and more varied classrooms feature in those national reports too, but administrative load is the one a school's own systems decide.

What teachers say about new tools

TALIS 2024 also asked teachers about artificial intelligence. The OECD's headline is that about one in three teachers now uses it for work. Education International's analysis of the lower secondary data puts the figure nearer 41%, ranging from about 75% in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates to 14% in France.

Among teachers who use these tools, the most common uses are:

• learning about or summarising a topic (68%)
• generating lesson plans or activities (64%)
• assessing or marking student work (26%)
• reviewing data on student participation or performance (25%)

Teachers are also wary. 72% believe these tools let students pass off work that is not their own, and 66% say they can make inappropriate or incorrect recommendations. Of the teachers who do not use them, 75% say they lack the knowledge and skills, and only about 38% of all teachers had any training on the subject in the previous year.

What a school can take from this

• Count the paperwork before adding to it. Ask teachers to log one ordinary week. Most schools have never measured where those administrative hours go.
• Collect each piece of information once. Attendance, marks and contact details typed into two systems are typed twice. The survey's stress figures are a reason to remove duplicates, not just to tolerate them.
• Train before you roll out. The gap between use and training in the survey is large. New tools without support add to the load they were meant to reduce.
• Ask your own staff. National averages are a starting point. A short anonymous survey of your own teachers, using a few TALIS questions, tells you where your school sits.