Fighting for reasonable teacher workloads

Current teaching workloads are bad for teachers; bad for schools, bad for students, bad for the profession, and bad for society.

Teachers have a right to a reasonable, equitable and achievable working life, with limited hours and the ability to leave the job on the desk at the end of the day. But for 40 years our workload has steadily increased, creeping out of the classroom and into our lives outside of work.

Think1265 was founded by two fulltime teachers in 2024, and is dedicated to helping everyone in education finally enjoy the reasonable, equitable, and achievable working life our contractual agreements say we should have.

Teaching is a hard job, but it doesn’t have to be an impossible one. It’s time everyone in education stuck by our contractual agreements and stopped relying on goodwill and unpaid labour to keep our schools running.

Know your rights

The biggest reason teachers work unreasonable hours is because schools either don’t know (or don’t implement) existing workload agreements. Here is a simple breakdown of some of the core rights you have over workload.

Directed Time Budgets

Since 1987 the key mechanism to ensure teachers’ workload is managed properly is the Directed Time Budget. The page tells you how your DTB should work, along with some tools to help you sort your DTB out.

Resources and shop

We have developed a number of tools and resources which can help teachers to manage their workload properly. Our shop contains both free and paid resources to help teachers build the reasonable and fair workload we all deserve.