The Hidden Hours: What Irish Teachers Actually Spend Their Week On
Ask any Irish secondary teacher how their week breaks down and the answer is rarely the one their contract suggests. The teaching itself is the visible bit. Everything around it is the work nobody outside a school sees — and it is consuming an enormous amount of time.
We looked at this honestly across a typical week for a Junior Cycle and Leaving Cert teacher. Here is what the maths actually looks like.
Where the hours go
Marking — 4 to 6 hours a week
MCQ tests get marked by hand. Class tests get marked at the kitchen table on a Sunday. End-of-topic quizzes pile up in a corner. Even at two minutes per script, a single class quiz across 28 students is nearly an hour. Multiply that across five classes and the number stops being abstract.
Hunting for resources — 2 to 3 hours a week
A model answer from 2019. The marking scheme for Q4 of Paper 2. A worksheet that is not the same one you used last year. The hunting itself is not the issue — every teacher does it. The issue is doing it on a phone at 9pm because the lesson is at 9am tomorrow.
Building mock exams — 90 minutes per mock, several times a year
Pulling questions from past papers, formatting in Word, checking the marking scheme matches, printing, photocopying. Every department head knows this job. Most teachers do it twice a year, minimum.
Photocopying and admin — 1 to 2 hours a week
Queueing for the photocopier. Logging into the printer. Reformatting a PDF that printed sideways. Tracking which class got which sheet. Small individually, large in aggregate.
Chasing missing work — 1 hour a week
Homework that didn’t arrive. Students who missed Friday’s quiz. Parents who want to know what their child should be doing. None of it is teaching. All of it has to be done.
The total
8 to 12 hours a week, every week. That is roughly a full working day spent on tasks that do not involve standing in front of a class.
Most schools accept this as the cost of doing business. It is not. It is the cost of the systems most schools are using — or rather, the systems they aren’t using.
What changes with a school licence
This is the part principals tend to underestimate. A school licence is not a software purchase. It is a time recovery exercise.
- Auto-scored MCQ quizzes save 3 to 4 hours of marking per teacher per week
- A single resource library replaces 2 hours of weekly hunting
- The exam builder cuts a 90-minute mock setup down to 15 minutes
- Print-ready PDFs of any resource end the photocopier queue
- Content assignment to classes replaces the homework chase
Across a department of ten teachers, that is 30 to 50 hours a week of recovered time. At the price of one whole-school licence — covered under the Schoolbooks Grant — the maths is not subtle.
The reframe for September
If you are a deputy principal looking at the September budget, the question is not whether you can afford a school platform. The question is whether you can afford another year of teachers giving away ten hours a week to admin that software solves.
Time is the only resource a school cannot order more of. Everything else — books, copies, paper, even teachers — has a procurement process. Teacher hours don’t.
The teachers in your school are giving them away anyway. A school licence is how you get them back.
