Cut the workload that was never yours to carry, and get back the evenings the job keeps taking. Practical, evidence-based, and short enough to actually read.
Cambridge-trained HMI-assessed Lead Practitioner and Teacher Trainer/Mentor.
Most workload advice is either too vague to use or too academic to read at the end of a twelve-hour day. This is built to dip in and out of. Pick it up for ten minutes on a Tuesday break, and put it down with something you can use before the day’s out. It’s intentionally short. The last thing a busy teacher needs is another 350-page doorstop.
No theory for theory’s sake. Every chapter ends with something you can do.
The DfE keeps a list of admin jobs that aren’t part of a teacher’s role. Most teachers have never seen it. It’s in here, with a simple three-question test for anything that lands on your desk that shouldn’t.
Whole-class feedback, live in-lesson marking, peer assessment done properly: the approaches the research actually backs, including what happened when one school let teachers mark however they liked.
The chapter I wish had existed when I qualified. The workload traps specific to your first three years, the email problem nobody warns you about, and behaviour management in year one.
A straight look at what teachers actually use AI for, the tools worth knowing, and the GDPR question most people skip past.
Two parts: protecting your own workload, and managing it for your team. Plus what changed at one school when they stopped talking about wellbeing and started measuring it.
Why your energy belongs at the centre of teaching and learning, with the science on how a present, energised teacher changes what happens in a class, and how to protect that across a career.
You’re doing everything for the first time, so everything takes twice as long. That’s normal for the first three years. Chapter 7 is written for you, with the workload traps specific to where you are right now.
Without feeling you’re short-changing your classes. This is about working in a way you can sustain for years, not weeks.
Chapter 9 covers your own load and your team’s, and what culture change actually looks like in practice rather than on a poster.
The book is written around English schools, but the strategies travel. The free International Teacher Quick Reference maps every piece of guidance to your own country: Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Same approaches, your terminology and rules. Grab it before you start, and read the book with your context already in place.
Barry Taylor nails this. The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers, and this book has that front and centre. It’s full of suggestions for reflection, and some might just land with you at the right time.
Thoughtful reflection alongside practical strategies to address the workload challenges many teachers face. At a time when teacher retention is a pressing priority, it offers a timely and practical contribution. It would serve as an effective companion to the mentoring process, particularly for early career teachers.
Where does a 50-hour week actually go? This three-minute walkthrough shows the Task Audit Matrix from the book: a four-box grid that maps every task by its impact on learning against the workload it costs, so you can see what to keep, what to streamline, and what to challenge or stop.
Every strategy in the book gets a walkthrough like this inside The Edacity Vault, the growing library behind the books.
Reads on any phone, tablet or laptop, with clickable contents and links.
Instant downloadReady-to-use PDF packs that put the book’s strategies straight to work. Buy singly, or get the lot in one bundle.
The whole-school licence gives your entire team, at every level, the book and every companion pack. Across a full staff it works out at pennies per teacher a month, far less than it costs to replace a single teacher lost to burnout.
Barry left school with two GCSEs and was homeless at nineteen. Seven months on the street and in shelters. By twenty-six he had a first-class degree and a place on a PGCE at the University of Cambridge. Seven years, no head start, no safety net.
He’s worked with schools for over 30 years, teaching and lecturing, running departments, and training and mentoring teachers. He became one of the UK’s fastest-progressing Advanced Skills Teachers, HMI-assessed, in three years. He’s also been through burnout himself, which is part of why this book exists.
Every strategy in it came from necessity. It was written by someone who hit the walls and worked out how to get past them, not someone who found teaching easy and decided to explain how.
The free Workload Diagnostic asks about a typical week, then sends you a personalised PDF report. You get your Workload Temperature on a 0–100 scale (from steady to boiling over), a six-point map showing exactly where the pressure sits, and an estimate of the hours you could win back each week, with the first changes worth making.
Five minutes. No cost. Your report lands in your inbox.
Manageable for now, but pressure is building in a few specific places. Worth acting before it climbs.
You’re rebuilding the wheel most weeks, on your own time. A reusable system gives those evenings back.