Those who saw themselves as working unreasonable hours were the same people as those who worked longer hours during the survey week and who reported more experiences of stress. The people in the sample had some sort of workload limit, which seemed to be getting stretched. Just over half saw the survey week as reasonable, just under half saw it as unreasonable. There was a less clear cut response to the question of whether the week had been typical. This perhaps indicates some conflict in expectations of work, and signals the importance of the work tasks themselves.
More work is reasonable if the kind of work demanded is reasonable.
Classroom teachers and those with management responsibilities had slightly different lists of codewords given their different range of tasks. For both primary and secondary teachers, Figure 1 under-represents the hours spent teaching. There were some 15-minute time spans when teaching was interrupted, where admin was followed by teaching, where some marking had to be done. Teachers themselves may also have decided, when faced with a broken time span, to record the major activity rather than give both. Nevertheless, on counting work in school and work at home, both groups of teachers spent about as much time on work allied to teaching as on direct class teaching itself.