Education secretary says more will be done to tackle stress that is driving qualified staff away

The education secretary, Damian Hinds, has admitted too many teachers in England are being overwhelmed by excessive workloads and has pledged to do more to relieve the causes of stress that have been pushing qualified staff out of the classroom.

The move came as Hinds argued that schools were on a par with the NHS as a “special case” for extra government spending, as behind the scenes negotiations over funding continued to delay any announcement on a pay rise for teachers.

Saying that workload pressure was the No 1 complaint among teachers he spoke to, Hinds said he was committed to tackling the problem, unveiling a new “toolkit” showing school staff how to ditch time-consuming issues such as onerous marking policies and demanding parents.

In an interview with the Guardian, Hinds also:

• Defended the new, tougher A-level and GCSE exams as helping to prepare pupils for the real world.

• Rebuked primary schools that put pressure on young pupils to do well in their national assessments or Sats.

• Warned grammar schools that their expansion would only succeed if they took more children from disadvantaged families.



Workload and long hours have become the subjects of increasing complaints from 400,000-plus state school teachers, making staff retention one of Hinds’s top priorities.

The education secretary, who has been in post for six months, said he had become aware of the workload pressures on teachers after visiting schools in his East Hampshire constituency, but said there were no easy answers.

“I think politicians would love to believe – and some people out there do believe – that this is a simple matter of bureaucracy, and there are some forms that schools are being made to fill out by us or by Ofsted, or whoever,” he said.

“But it’s just not that simple. If we could just find those forms or the pieces of bureaucracy to remove, then the people before me would have done it. It’s a much more complex issue than that.”

While teacher workload is not a new issue, Hinds said that recent developments, such as increased email contact with parents, data entry demands by school leaders and fashionable theories of “deep marking” – often in triplicate – had made matters worse for those at the chalkface.

“Email makes contact from and with parents much more frequent and there can be an expectation of rapid response. All of us get this in our working lives, but when you are a teacher dealing with a classroom full of kids, with parents who have high expectations, then I think that pressure can be particularly great,” Hinds said.

The DfE’s new workload toolkit will highlight schools that have got rid of onerous practices and policies such as lesson planning and data entry designed to minutely track pupil performance.

Hinds has also pledged to end the constant cycle of reforms and tinkering from his own department that have caused extra workload for teachers.

“One of my commitments to the profession is: I can’t promise [there will be] no change but I can say we need a period now of less change and making sure that there is a good period of time to adjust before something new comes in,” Hinds said.

In the meantime he is trying to squeeze more funding out the Treasury, a task made more difficult by the early announcement of an additional £20bn for the NHS as a special case.

“Education is a special case too. We’re responsible for helping parents, supporting them in the bringing up of the next generation,” Hinds said. “We’re responsible for helping to drive productivity, which drives economic growth. We need people to fill the jobs of the future, and some of those we can’t predict yet what they are, but we are also in the business of helping kids grow up into happy and fulfilled adults. So education is absolutely a special case.”

After Labour was perceived as making education spending a vote-winner at the last election, Hinds was at pains to highlight his government’s record, pointing to the £1.3bn moved to hold per pupil funding for a further two years at a time when pupil numbers were growing.

“Schools do manage their budgets very well. I recognise that budgets are tight – there have been particular cost pressures over the last two or three years. The work we’re doing on purchasing, on recruitment costs, on supply agencies and so on, that is to help managing cost pressures,” he said.

The lack of an agreement with Treasury has probably delayed the DfE’s response to the teacher pay review panel’s recommendation. If no extra funds are forthcoming then any pay rise mandated by the DfE would have to come out of existing school budgets.



On Friday the leaders of three education unions – the Association of School and College Leaders, the National Association of Head Teachers and the National Education Union – wrote to Hinds to complain the delay had left school budgets in limbo.

“The impact of not fully funding the pay award will bring schools to crisis point and place our headteacher members in an invidious position, making it necessary to set deficit budgets and leading to schools becoming insolvent,” the unions said.

But with parliament’s recess approaching, Hinds remains tight-lipped. “There is a process across government, and we are part-way through that process at the moment,” he said.

Hinds was quick to praise teachers who have had to endure the overhaul of the curriculum and exam content for both GCSEs and A-levels. But he is convinced that the overhaul was needed because of years of grade inflation.

“I think the system has responded incredibly well to the reforms, and we’ve see that coming through in the results. I don’t apologise for saying we should have high academic standards.”

The tougher new exams are likely to have made exam season more fraught but Hinds regards that as part of their purpose. “Part of school, a big part, is about preparing young people for the reality of life, which does have its ups and its down. Ultimately we do need to have examinations.”

But he said exam stress did not belong in primary schools.

“When we talk about national assessments, at the end of primary school, it’s really, really not good to be putting pressure on children for those. Those are not public exams in the sense that the results are going to stay with you in later life.”

The government’s policy of allowing grammar schools to expand, for the first time in many years, has attracted controversy. But Hinds said their expansion made up only a fraction of the growth seen across secondary schools as pupil numbers rose.

Critics maintain that children from disadvantaged families struggle to gain admission to grammar schools, often denied the advantages of parental support and private tutoring of their better-off peers. But Hinds has a blunt warning for grammars wanting a slice of the Department for Education’s £50m expansion fund: “A simple measure is kids on free school meals – I want to see more kids on free school meals at grammar schools.”



The shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, said: “Thanks to campaigning by teachers across the country, ministers have finally conceded that their workloads have now become unacceptable.

“The best thing the government could do for teachers’ morale is commit to new funding to give our teachers the pay rise they deserve and schools the resources they need.”