What have I learned from teachers, school, and college leaders this academic year?
Workload, school inspection, practical resources, and artificial intelligence have remained pivotal themes throughout the 2025/26 academic year.
Each year, I try to look beyond the political headlines and consider what teachers’ behaviour tells us about the profession. What are teachers and schools searching for? When and where are they seeking support? Which resources continue to resonate, and what might these patterns tell us about workload, professional learning and life in schools? Having worked with teachers, visited schools and analysed another year of online activity, five themes stand out.
1. Workload is changing, but parental communication is increasing
Teacher workload remains one of the profession’s most persistent challenges.
This year, I have engaged with more than 4,500 teachers through school visits, training, conferences, online events and classroom observation. Although technology and artificial intelligence are changing how some tasks are completed, the underlying pressures remain familiar.
The most striking change in government workload data is parental communication.
While time associated with marking, behaviour-related processes and general administration appears to be reducing, communication with parents and families is moving in the opposite direction. Teachers and school leaders are dealing with a growing volume of emails, queries, complaints and requests for detailed responses.
This is not just my observation. The Department for Education’s workload and wellbeing conversation guide acknowledges that school leaders have identified complaints management as a significant driver of workload. An ASCL survey of school leaders also found that parental behaviour was increasing workload and distracting leaders from teaching and learning. I suspect that artificial intelligence is accelerating this trend.
More parents and family members appear to be using AI to compose complaints, expand relatively simple concerns into lengthy formal correspondence and introduce legalistic language into communications with schools. This can make it easier to raise a complaint, but it does not necessarily make the concern easier to understand or resolve.
This remains an emerging trend rather than a settled conclusion, but reports from schools are beginning to support it. Last year, Tes reported a rise in suspected AI-generated complaints, including unusually long and legalistic submissions, with schools seeking support with complaints that appear to have been generated using AI.
AI may be helping people write more, but it is not always helping schools and families understand one another better. It may also reduce workload on one side of the school gate, but appears to be increasing it on the other.
2. School inspection reform has produced mixed evidence
Inspection and accountability have continued to generate significant debate throughout the year.
The renewed inspection framework and report-card approach were intended to provide a more detailed picture than a single-word judgement. Ofsted has published an explanation of its new report cards and grading system, alongside the research and guidance underpinning the renewed framework.
The word on the ground from school leaders is that the evidence remains mixed.
Some leaders describe constructive professional conversations and inspectors taking greater account of context. Others continue to report inspectors conducting themselves poorly, inconsistent interpretations of the framework, delays between inspection and publication, and concerns about how the pattern of judgements is reported and interpreted as an overall verdict on a school.
These concerns should not be dismissed as resistance to accountability.
Ofsted’s own statistics covering the renewed framework are currently described as official statistics in development. Meanwhile, an NEU response to an independent post-inspection survey argues that the renewed process is still negatively affecting workload and leaders’ well-being. The picture is therefore neither wholly positive nor wholly negative.
The framework is new, the evidence base is still developing, and the quality of an inspection can depend heavily on how consistently inspectors apply it. It’s the same old problem.
3. Teachers still crave practical, subject-specific resources
Teachers continue to search for resources they can understand, adapt and use immediately. This year, the blog welcomed 345,000 teachers searching for ideas and resources across the site – clicks and scrolls exceed 5 million interactions!
The continued popularity of practical templates tells us something important. Teachers are not necessarily looking for more material. They are looking for greater clarity, implementation, better relevance and resources that address the reality of their classrooms. Personally, AI can’t achieve this as well as a human, which is why The Toolkit resource hub is growing in popularity. The more subject-specific a resource is, the better.
Generic teaching advice may provide a useful starting point, but teachers want to see what an idea looks like in mathematics, art, English, science, history, design and technology, or another specialist context. They want practical examples that respect disciplinary knowledge rather than treating every subject as if it can be taught in the same way.
Outside subject specialism, SEND remains the number-one request in my teacher-training enquiries.
The scale of this need is reflected in the government’s announcement of a £200 million SEND teacher-training programme, intended to extend SEND and inclusion training across nurseries, schools and colleges. It is also reported in several DfE publications and teacher professional development surveys.
4. Online behaviour reveals the hidden working day
This year’s analytics provide another glimpse into when and how teachers engage with professional content. The most popular day for accessing this blog was THURSDAY, while the busiest time was 8 PM. Readers spent an average of 72 seconds on each visit, with a 50-50 split between mobile and desktop access. The most frequently searched topics included:
- adaptive teaching (1,242 searches),
- behaviour (1,014 searches) and
- marking (734 searches).
These searches matter because online behaviour can reveal pressures that surveys do not always capture. Activity in the early morning, evening or at weekends may show professional curiosity, but it may also indicate that teachers cannot find sufficient time for development during the working day.
The latest national workload research also suggests that, although average working hours may be gradually easing, workload remains substantial. The Department for Education’s Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders survey provides a useful national comparison for these patterns- something I have been researching for almost 15 years.
Short online visits do not necessarily suggest a lack of engagement. They may show that teachers are highly purposeful in the short time they have available.
This information has several implications for anyone creating content for teachers:
- Communicate the purpose immediately;
- Make important information easy to locate;
- Design resources for mobile as well as desktop use;
- Offer concise summaries alongside deeper explanations;
- Use examples rooted in specific subjects and phases;
- include SEND considerations where appropriate;
- Avoid unnecessary barriers, lengthy introductions and complicated downloads.
In my experience, teachers remain eager to learn, but their attention is being squeezed into increasingly small spaces.
5. School challenges are unanimous
After visiting 40+ schools and colleges and working with teachers across 20,000 miles this year, the same concerns continued to surface: funding, recruitment, workload, attendance, falling admissions, behaviour, SEND provision and staff wellbeing. The context varies from school to school, but the pressures are widely shared.
There are some encouraging signs in teacher recruitment. The Department for Education’s 2025/26 Initial Teacher Training Census reported increases in the number of candidates accepted onto teacher-training programmes, including growth across several shortage subjects. However, it still baffles me why we lose 40,000 teachers every academic year!
We know that improved recruitment, bursary allocation or some other initiative in any one year does not remove the longer-term challenge of retaining experienced teachers or ensuring that every school can recruit the subject expertise it needs. At the same time, I have continued to see extraordinary commitment and generosity from so many teachers – often unpaid work!
6. What have I learned from my own use of AI?
Well, firstly, I cannot use it to publish any of my books. I think this is a particularly good thing to ensure quality. Anyone can write a blog these days, but not everyone can do it for 20 years, right?
My work with AI tools has reinforced several lessons, particularly saturation.
It reminds me of using a calculator. If I keep using it, I lose the mental capacity to solve equations and simple maths problems on my own. It’s a tool I can have on my desk or on my mobile phone, but if I don’t have the prior knowledge to use the information, apply it in a different context, or think without a physical calculator, I run the risk of cognitive decline.
First, AI is most useful as a starting point. Its initial response may help organise an idea, but the real value emerges through questioning, criticism and revision. This can obviously be done within the AI itself, but hopefully we have the mental capacity to ask the right questions rather than wait for the AI to tell us what questions we should be asking.
Second, context matters. The quality of an output improves when the tool understands the audience, the intended outcome, and the practical constraints. I suspect you and I have spent many hours carving out reliable prompts.
Third, teacher expertise remains essential. AI does not know a class, understand a school community or carry professional responsibility for the consequences of its advice. I firmly believe teaching is a relationship-based profession, and in some cases, when AI replaces the classroom teacher, I get the shivers!
Finally, it has been encouraging to see more and more schools become AI literate, with increased use of tools, emerging policies, as well as educating parents, governors and the ethical use and application with their students.
For teachers experimenting with AI, I recommend five principles:
- Begin with a real problem rather than a desire to use the technology.
- Never assume that a confident answer is an accurate one.
- Remove personal and sensitive information before using an AI tool.
- Adapt every output to the pupils, subject and context.
- Ask whether the tool is supporting thinking, or replacing the thinking pupils need to do.
Looking ahead
As we end this academic year (my 34th in education) and look towards the new academic year, I remain interested in the relationship between teacher workload, online behaviours, artificial intelligence and professional learning. Several questions deserve further exploration for me next term:
- Are teachers using AI to reduce workload or simply to produce more?
- How is AI improving communication between families and schools?
- Why does SEND support remain such a significant professional-development need?
- Which subject-specific resources produce lasting changes in classroom practice?
- What would a more consistent, constructive and humane system of inspection look like?
These answers will not be found in my website analytics alone, but my continued teacher training experiences will help connect the dots. The challenge is to listen carefully to what teacher behaviour is already telling us, and hope one day the government acts upon it.
It’s been another challenging year as a small business, but the website is growing, and the desire from schools and colleges across the UK to have me working alongside their teaching staff remains the greatest privilege of my career.
