School Leadership

The government wants teachers working fewer days. The hours stay exactly the same.

Lucy Powell has asked the pay review body to let full-time teachers complete their 1,265 hours over fewer than 195 days. One trust already tried it, and kept the numbers.

Empower Educators29 October 20266 min read

Written from the Department for Education’s published remit letter of 22 October 2026 and the Tes and Telegraph reporting of its contents. Every figure below is attributed. Empower Educators is not affiliated with the Department for Education, the School Teachers’ Review Body, NAHT, ASCL, the NEU or any outlet named here.

A teacher in a blazer standing with her arms folded in front of a blackboard, looking steadily at the camera

On 22 October the Department for Education published a letter from the Education Secretary, Lucy Powell, to Dr Mike Aldred, chair of the School Teachers’ Review Body — asking, in the department’s own description, for recommendations on teachers’ working conditions for 2027 to 2028.Department for Education, gov.uk, published 22 October 2026

Reported the next day, it became a four-day-week story almost immediately. That is not quite what the letter asks for, and the gap between the two matters to anyone running a timetable.

What changes, and what does not

Full-time teachers in England are currently required to be available for 1,265 directed hours a year, spread across 195 days — 190 teaching days and five INSET days. Nothing in the letter touches the 1,265. What it asks the review body to consider is whether those same hours could be completed over fewer than 195 days, with schools timetabled so pupils are still taught five days a week.As reported by the Telegraph (Albert Tait, 23 October 2026) and Tes (22 October 2026)

The proposal, row by row
What it covers	Under the proposal
Total directed hours (1,265 a year)	No change
Maximum days teachers can be required to work	Stays at 195
Minimum days hours can be spread across	Currently 195; the letter asks whether that should fall
Days pupils are taught, five days a week	No change
A teacher’s right to shorter weeks on request	None created; the school still decides
Who recommends how it would work	The School Teachers’ Review Body, asked to report on 2027–28

As reported. Powell’s own words, quoted in that reporting: the change “must not affect pupil time in schools”, and no teacher could be required to work more than 195 days.

Reading those rows together, the proposal is narrower than most of the coverage of it. Nobody’s hours fall. No teacher gains a right to a shorter week; a head gains the option to offer one, if the review body decides it can work and the department accepts the recommendation. The letter is a question to a pay body, not a policy.

A disappointingly unambitious remit.
Paul Whiteman, General Secretary, NAHT, as reported by Tes

Whiteman’s union represents school leaders, and his complaint was about scope, not direction: that a remit built around “a handful of marginal changes” does little for recruitment, retention or workload. ASCL’s general secretary, Pepe Di’Iasio, took the opposite position on the same letter, saying the union “broadly supported and welcomed” it and framing it as a step toward attracting “the brightest and the best graduates” into teaching. Two leadership unions, reading the same four pages, reached opposite verdicts on whether it goes far enough.As reported by Tes and the Telegraph, 22–23 October 2026

The hours the proposal starts from

What any of this is meant to fix is not in dispute. The DfE’s own survey of the profession, run for government by IFF Research and the UCL Institute of Education, puts a number on it every year.

Average hours worked a week, full-time staff, England
Role	2024	2025
Teachers (all phases)	51.2	50.1
Primary teachers	52.5	51.4
Secondary teachers	50.3	49.3
School leaders	57.6	56.5

Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders, wave 4, published April 2026. Full-time staff only; part-time staff bring every average down further. Hours have fallen for two years running and remain roughly ten to fifteen hours above a standard working week.

That is the backdrop the letter is written against: hours that are falling and are still long. A proposal about when those hours are worked does not shorten them. What it changes, if the review body recommends it and a school chooses to use it, is the shape of the week — not its length.

One trust has already run it

The letter asks for recommendations on something at least one multi-academy trust has been doing for over a year. Dixons Academies Trust moved around 800 teaching staff across its 17 primary and secondary academies in Yorkshire onto a nine-day fortnight — the same total hours, compressed so staff get every other Friday off.Tes, reporting on Dixons Academies Trust’s flexible working policy

The trust’s own 12-month review, published through the 4 Day Week campaign, reports a 43% fall in staff turnover, 518 fewer sickness-absence days and a 12% rise in applicants for advertised posts. Those are the trust’s figures about its own policy, and this article treats them as that — a result one organisation reports about itself, not an independent finding.

The independent part is narrower and still worth having: an evaluation run for the Education Endowment Foundation found staff reporting improved wellbeing, job satisfaction and work–life balance under the nine-day fortnight. The same evaluation recorded a real cost on the other side — some staff said the condensed timetable left them feeling overwhelmed — and Schools Week reported a practical trade-off beneath both: some subjects end up taught by two teachers instead of one. The trust says the policy has not cost it more money to run.Education Endowment Foundation evaluation, as reported by Schools Week

Before this is a staffroom conversation

Nothing changes this term. If it becomes real, these are the questions the Dixons evidence suggests a school will actually have to answer, not the ones the headline suggests.

1Who covers the subject when a teacher’s compressed day lands on a pupil’s exam fortnight?Dixons’ own trade-off: some subjects are taught by two teachers rather than one. That is a curriculum decision, not a rota one.
2Does a longer day actually fit the job, or only the timetable?Marking, planning and pastoral calls do not compress the way lesson periods do. A nine-day fortnight that only moves teaching time and leaves the rest untouched has not solved the problem it was offered to solve.
3Who decides, and on what evidence?The letter creates no entitlement. If the review body recommends the change, the choice to offer it sits with the school — which means a policy, a rationale and a way to say no, not an improvised yes to the first person who asks.
4What would you actually measure?Dixons tracked turnover, sickness and applications and published the numbers. A school that cannot name what it would track before changing the week has no way to know, a year later, whether the change did anything.

None of this is live policy. It is a letter asking a pay body for advice, due to report by April 2027 at the earliest.

What this is not

It is not a four-day week in the sense most of the early coverage implied, and it is not a pay cut, a workload cut or a cut to the time pupils spend in school. It is not yet policy: it is a question to the body that advises on exactly this, and that body’s own 36th report, delivered earlier this year, had already said that changes to working time would be better handled through a dedicated remit of their own rather than folded into pay — which is close to what this letter now does.

The number that will not move is 1,265. Whatever the review body recommends, nobody is about to work fewer hours. The only question on the table is which five, or four, days those hours land on — and Dixons is the one trust that can already say what happened when it answered that question for itself.