Teachers’ workload consumed by reporting student behaviour, study finds

Led by former high school teacher Greg Thompson, Professor of Education Research at ACU, the study looked at how teachers’ record-keeping requirements via an online management system led to their sense of being time poor and under pressure throughout the day.

Drawing on large-scale digital time use data collection and teacher case studies, a clear audit culture emerged from the results with layers of administrative burden bearing down on teachers. 

The state’s teachers are required to use the OneSchool SMS to record a range of student data, including assessment results and behaviour incidents – a requirement that was understood by participants as necessary for ‘transparency’.

“Schools now need to maintain rigorous, centralised records of all incidents to safeguard children and demonstrate institutional fairness, which has further complexified the everyday work of teachers and school leaders,” the study states.

One early career teacher reported that “everything needs to be recorded”.

“…And I think that we have a real sense of fear about transparency. And I understand where it comes from…”

Trust in individuals within schools has been replaced by audit practices, accounting and onerous record keeping, the study suggests.

“For teachers and school leaders alike, this manifested as an awareness of legal repercussions in the future if incidents are not documented correctly, and the potential professional consequences if decisions are later challenged and there is inadequate evidence to support them.

“This means that there is a whole system of surveillance, normalisation of practice and acceptance of the logic of risk embedded within the OneSchool SMS,” the paper asserts. 

Indeed, teachers said that even minor student incidents needed to have a data trail behind them.

“I know in my role everything needs to be documented. You have a short conversation with a student, it needs to be on OneSchool … so then admin, like deputies and principals can give consequences. Otherwise, nothing happens. We can’t intervene if people don’t record all the information,” one guidance counsellor from a secondary school shared.

The push for transparency has created the need to “record absolutely everything”, including, for example, when students arrive not having necessary equipment for class.

Yet as another early career teacher noted:

“I struggle with what do I actually OneSchool and what do I not? What do I just let go as classroom management? ‘Cos all that teachers talk about is how sick they are of OneSchool. It’s that ingrained culture of not wanting to do it, but knowing you have to.”

Teachers say that even minor student incidents now need to have a data trail behind them.

The catch-22 of OneSchool is that behaviour disruptions impact lesson time and the ability of teachers to cover what they need, but for the system to respond so that the disruption is resolved, this requires cycles of data being entered that also chews up significant time, the study flagged. 

“Regardless of experience and role in the school, the use of the OneSchool SMS added a cascading series of tasks to everyone’s workloads,” the researchers stated.

This had to be done on top of teachers’ face-to-face teaching duties.

To ‘OneSchool something’ had even become part of teachers’ lingo, such was its ubiquity in their work.

Some teachers expressed frustration and resentment over the situation.

“If there’s behaviour problems, we’ve got to OneSchool. We’ve got to record everything. When there is an incident, I’m expected to contact home and have a discussion at home, [then] with staff so that it can be seen that I’m following through with the parent on OneSchool rather than just: “There’s been an incident. I’ve recorded it”.

“My job’s to teach, not to constantly be following up that sort of stuff,” one lamented.

One Melbourne teacher told EducationHQ that the need to ‘chronicle’ information about students – be it if they wore the wrong socks to class, did or said something positive that aligned with the values of the school, or were incredibly disruptive, for example – had created a scene where staff were feeling closely watched by school leadership.

“They keep track of how many chronicles you log in a year, I don’t know why, because you’re ‘doing your job’ – you’re seen to be on top of what the kids are doing if you [make these entries] all the time,” the teacher said.

Any conversation with a parent also had to be logged in the system so that year-level coordinators were across the communication, the educator noted.

“So, everybody’s in the loop, which in a way it’s a good idea. But logging everything is time-consuming.

“And [it feels like leaders use it as a means of watching what you’re doing].”

Rather than having to record extremely minor student behaviour issues or every conversation that occurs throughout the day, the teacher said it would be better if only more serious and/or critical things were logged online.

“The kids are very aware of ‘the chronicles’, of what’s being written about them.

“The green chronicle, that’s a reward and they get house points.

“The problem with it is, because it’s become a reward system, the kids tell you, ‘oh, I did what you told me to do, so can I get a green chronicle for that?’

“And you think, ‘no, you’re just doing what I told you to do, because that’s what you need to do’. So they expect you to reward them…”

In 2023, the Queensland Education Minister became so concerned about the effect that recording student behaviour had on teachers’ time she ruled that minor incidents were no longer to be recorded.

But confusion between what constituted minor and major behaviours ensued, the researchers point out.

An important claim of school management systems like OneSchool is that they offer greater efficiency for schools and their staff. 

But the study proposes that the drive towards technology as a solution to the profession’s crushing workload woes “may be misguided and may exacerbate the problems that it seeks to solve”.

One teacher described how there was a lot of double up in the OneSchool recording processes.

“Once you send an email, you have to then copy that email and then paste it in a separate section….

“You have to do lots of double handling and make sure that you have all of the information you have to record absolutely everything. Then they respond to you. Then you’ve got to go back into that kid, find the email, copy it and paste it in OneSchool and then save it.

“Contacting parents for minor things is tedious and annoying,” they concluded.

And when incidents from Monday are still requiring follow up on Tuesday, and then there are behaviour incidents on that day that also need to be documented, it can “seem that behaviour incidents have no end, they are limitless and become untethered from their original point of origin,” the study found.

The intensification of teachers’ work caused by OneSchool contributes to the stress and burnout within the profession, it suggested.

“Given the ongoing push to use digital technology to solve the problem of teachers’ time, it may be that we simply shift the problem rather than meaningfully intervene in it,” the researchers concluded.