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How well do we measure teacher workload?
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 19 September 2019
Over the last five years, the Department for Education has taken steps to reduce teacher workload. This was spurred by results from the TALIS 2013 survey which illustrated how teachers in England work longer hours than teachers in most other countries. The government subsequently pledged to “[collect]robust evidence on teacher workload at least every two years”.
But what counts as “robust evidence”? And has the DFE kept this promise? Let’s take a look.
What would “robust evidence” look like?
For evidence on teacher workload to really be “robust” it should meet the following three criteria (at least):
- The survey should include a large enough sample of teachers to minimise uncertainty due to sampling error
- The sample of teachers should be randomly selected andhave a high response rate
- The questions used to collect data on working hours should have as little measurement error as possible
The main source the DFE uses to track teacher workload is the Teacher Workload Survey – (TWS). How well does this resource meet these criteria?
Well, the sample size is certainly large – over 3,000 teachers in 2016. But, as for the other two criteria? I am not so sure.
Is the TWS really representative of teachers in England?
Although the TWS draws a random sample, its credibility as a reliable source of information about teacher workload is undermined by its low response rates. Take the 2016 TWS. Out of the 900 schools initially selected, just 245 (27%) agreed to take part. Then, of the 10,410 teachers within these schools, just 3,186 (31%) completed the survey.
The final overall response rate can then be calculated by multiplying these two percentages together (27% multiplied by 31%). This gives a figure of just 8%.
Or, put another way, out of every 12 teachers who were meant to respond to the TWS, 11 didn’t.
With such a woeful response rate, the DFE’s promise to collect “robust evidence” on teacher workload looks a bit farfetched.
How reliably are working hours measured within teacher surveys?
The TWS essentially uses questions from TALIS (the Teaching and Learning International Survey) to measure teachers’ working hours. Specifically, respondents are asked:
a. A single question asking about total hours worked in a reference week;
b. Multiple questions asking about number of hours spent upon several different tasks (e.g. teaching, marking, administration, management).
The amount of time spent upon each task in b. can then be added together to give a second, separate estimate of teachers’ total working hours each week.
We can get a sense of how reliably teachers’ working hours are reported by comparing these two measures for the TALIS dataset. This is shown for England in the chart below.
Although there is a reasonable correlation between the two measures, it is far from perfect (the correlation coefficient is 0.74). In other words, there is quite a lot of reporting error in measures of teachers’ total working hours.
One of the implications of this is shown in the chart below, where total working hours of teachers are compared across countries using the two approaches.
Source: Authors’ calculations using TALIS 2018 database. Pearson (Spearman) correlation = 0.66 (0.61). Red triangles are high-performing PISA countries, green triangles low-performing PISA countries and blue dots countries with performance similar to England. OECD average is 41 hours per week when using a single question and 47 hours when using multiple questions. Analogous figures for England are 49 and 53 hours per week.
In some countries, the gap between the two measures is vast. In South Africa, for example, total reported working hours differ by 17 hours each week (35 versus 52 hours per week) depending which measure is used.
For England the gap is smaller, at around four hours – 49 hours versus 53. But that still represents a fair difference between the two measures – which raises more questions about measurement error. (It’s also worth saying that, whichever way you look at it, teachers in this country are working long hours.)
Given the fact that the TWS questions are based on those used in TALIS, we might suspect that similar issues exist with the TWS.
What should the DFE do instead?
This combination of low response rates and error in measurement has led me to conclude that the TWS, as it is currently designed, is not fit for purpose. It needs to change.
The gold standard would be for the next workload survey to attempt to gather time-use diary data from a truly representative cross-section of teachers. This will undoubtedly mean that the DFE has to commit more resource to measuring teacher workload, rather than trying to do it on the cheap.
Indeed, unless such data are collected, the DFE will probably never be able to measure teachers’ working hours with the necessary precision to determine whether their efforts to reduce teacher workload has succeeded.
This blogpost is part of a wider study into the health of teachers, funded by the Nuffield Foundation.
A sister blogpost released yesterday, summarising the latest evidence on teacher working hours in England, is available here.
One Response to “How well do we measure teacher workload?”
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This is interesting, but it’s perhaps important to be clear about what might be problematic or not.
1. Sampling error / bias
Overall participation rates and/or small sample sizes aren’t necessarily problems. Problems might follow more from biases, such as different people being more or less likely to respond to a survey, so that the final sample doesn’t match the expected sample.
A ‘low’ participation rate in TWS doesn’t entail that the entire sample/data is problematic or flawed – although it might reduce the statistical power to reveal some findings.
As an aside, schools and teachers cannot be forced to engage in research, and have many other obligations. Forcing teachers to participate isn’t exactly going to help their workloads…
2. Question phrasing
Remember that terms such as ‘measurement error’ are very general, and it’s important to be clear about what might be problematic. Abstracted ‘measurement error’ is somewhat unavoidable in any research – for example, when answering questions, people tend to approximate given limited time, varying motivation, and so on. If this is random, then it’s not necessarily a problem – although ‘random variation’ may entail that ‘variation linked with what we want to explore’ is harder to determine.
It sounds like an issue might be related to question phrasing or design issues, akin to ‘how could and should these areas be measured’ – because the total from across multiple questions about ‘hours worked’ seems to differ from the answer from a single-question about ‘total hours worked’.
In that case, it’s important to be clear about what the questions are exactly asking about – for example, the single-question might explicitly exclude some areas that are asked about within the detailed multiple questions.
Additionally, differences might plausibly reflect that (for example) when asked about a subject in detail over multiple questions, people might apply increased self-reflection and report things that they might have previously overlooked. (Is that necessarily a problem? The entire process seems to be mitigating against ‘everything relies on one single question’?)
3. Time diaries
I’m left feeling rather unclear how making data collection even more extensive, complex, and burdensome via time diaries would help. For example, how would timetabling various activities across an entire day for an entire week help achieve ‘necessary precision’ and eliminate ‘measurement error’? Many people would probably still approximate things – and might need incentives in order to undertake the extra burden (completing a time diary every day for a week rather than completing a 10-minute questionnaire).
4. Collecting data
Remember that, if existing data is considered to be problematic, you are always welcome to collect your own data. That gives you complete freedom to design your own sampling approach, questionnaire, and so on.