Australian teachers work an average of 46.4 hours per week, well above the OECD average of 40.8 hours. In addition, a quarter of full-time teachers report working more than 60 hours per week during term time. Behind those numbers sit thousands of educators marking papers at the kitchen table long after dinner. Topnotch Teaching, a professional resource platform for educators, argues that the problem is rarely effort. Instead, the problem is systems. Its approach centres on three practical shifts: organising resources properly, streamlining planning and assessment, and setting realistic boundaries around work. Together, these strategies help teachers reclaim personal time while keeping instruction strong.
Start With the Classroom Itself
Teachers spend around 10 hours each week designing, searching for, and organising instructional materials. Much of that time disappears into hunting for misplaced games, homework sheets and digital unit resources across fragmented systems. Topnotch Teaching recommends building functional storage systems before touching a lesson plan. Grouping physical and digital resources by unit or subject makes lesson setup dramatically faster. Visual containers do much of the work here. For instance, a 15-drawer organiser cart or a file folder pocket chart keeps unit materials pre-sorted and ready to deploy the moment a lesson begins.
The payoff extends beyond tidiness. When materials are readily accessible, instructional time is optimised, activities flow more smoothly and downtime shrinks. Furthermore, an organised workspace frees up mental space, which makes planning itself more effective.
Stop Reinventing the Wheel
The second shift targets the planning process directly. Many educators feel obliged to create every lesson, activity and game from scratch. Topnotch Teaching, however, advises against it. Proven, high-quality lesson ideas already exist in reliable books and online platforms. Adapting them takes a fraction of the time that original design demands. This mirrors the Pareto Principle: roughly 80 per cent of results come from 20 per cent of effort. As a result, identifying the activities that drive the most student learning and focusing energy there delivers better outcomes in less time.
Flexibility matters just as much. Modern classrooms require constant adjustment for diverse student needs. Rigid schedules collapse the moment a lesson runs long or a concept needs reteaching. Adaptable frameworks, by contrast, hold up. Topnotch Teaching encourages educators to identify the essential learning objective for each lesson plus one or two optional activities. When circumstances change, the teacher can pivot within the existing plan rather than drafting a new one.
Grade Less, Give Feedback More
Assessment is where workload pressure bites hardest. Australian teachers spend 18.1 hours per week on planning, marking and collaborative tasks, the fourth highest figure in the OECD. Moreover, half of all Australian teachers report that excessive marking is a significant source of stress. The wider picture is equally stark. A third of teachers say grading leaves them exhausted, and 62 per cent identify it as one of the worst aspects of the job.
Topnotch Teaching’s answer is selective grading. Not every task needs formal assessment. Immediate verbal feedback, delivered during one-on-one student conferencing while the class works independently, gives students faster and more useful input than written comments returned days later. It also saves hours of marking each week. This approach is commonly overlooked because it feels like cutting corners. In practice, though, it redirects assessment effort toward the tasks that genuinely inform teaching decisions.
Boundaries That Actually Hold
The third pillar addresses the workday itself. Constant multitasking slows productivity, so Topnotch Teaching urges educators to structure their schedules realistically, whether through digital calendars or paper planners. Batching similar tasks together, such as handling all marking in one block, keeps focus on one type of work at a time and boosts efficiency.
Collaboration completes the picture. Occupational research shows that high workload paired with insufficient social support is a primary predictor of emotional exhaustion, identified as a dominant risk factor across three-quarters of studies on teacher burnout. Consequently, strong collegial networks mitigate that risk. Sharing resources and planning responsibilities with year-level colleagues distributes curriculum design demands evenly and keeps lessons fresh. For school leaders, the implication is clear. Collaboration needs protected time in the timetable, not goodwill squeezed into lunch breaks.
Why This Matters Beyond One Teacher
Workload, work-life balance and work-related stress have consistently been the top three reasons teachers cite for intending to leave the profession. Indeed, these factors were selected by 69 to 75 per cent of the Australian teacher workforce in 2024. Retention is now a system-level risk, and individual coping strategies alone will not solve it. The strategies promoted by Topnotch Teaching point toward a broader shift. Schools that embed resource sharing, selective assessment policies and realistic scheduling into their culture reduce the burden on every teacher at once. There is also a strong case for building these habits into initial teacher training, so that new educators enter the profession with sustainable systems already in place.
The evidence connects teacher well-being directly to instructional quality. Ultimately, an exhausted workforce cannot deliver its best teaching, no matter how dedicated its members are.
The Road Ahead
Curriculum demands will keep growing, and class complexity will grow with them. The teachers who thrive will be those supported by systems that respect their time: organised classrooms, adapted rather than invented lessons, targeted assessment and shared planning loads. Platforms like Topnotch Teaching provide the practical blueprint. Nevertheless, schools and policy-makers now face the task of turning individual strategies into institutional norms. Teachers who reclaim their evenings return to the classroom sharper, calmer and better equipped to teach. That outcome serves students as much as it serves the profession.
