Schanionthe School Companion

Where teacher time goes, and how to measure it

A practical way to estimate the time a school could save on rolls, catch-up, family updates and marking evidence, and to test the estimate in a pilot.

By the Schanion team · · 2 min read

Teacher time is lost in small pieces. A roll that is re-keyed, an email explaining what a student missed, a weekly note to a parent, a first read of a pile of practice responses. No single piece is large, which is why the total is easy to underestimate and hard to argue about.

Before anyone claims a number, it helps to write down where the time goes.

Five places to look

  • The roll and attendance follow-up.
  • Preparing and sending catch-up for absent students.
  • Weekly messages and updates to families.
  • First-pass marking evidence on practice tasks.
  • Reporting and paperwork built from records that already exist.

Our planning assumptions

On the home page calculator we start from 15, 20, 15, 30 and 10 minutes a week per teacher across those five areas, which adds up to 90 minutes. Over 38 teaching weeks that is 57 hours for each teacher, and about 2,280 hours across 40 teachers.

These are planning assumptions, chosen to be tested. Schanion has not been trialled in a real school, so we have no measured result, and we do not present these figures as one.

Time is a value, not cash

Hours saved are worth something only if they go somewhere useful. They turn into money for the school only when they reduce relief, overtime or a tool you stop paying for. The pricing page keeps these apart: it shows the value of staff time, and it shows separately what a school could stop paying for.

How to measure it in a pilot

  1. Pick two or three classes and record, for two weeks before, how long the five tasks take.
  2. Run the pilot for a term with the same teachers.
  3. Record the same tasks again, and ask teachers what they did with the time.
  4. Use your own figures in the calculator, and decide on those.

The useful number is the break-even: how many minutes a week each teacher would need to save for the price to be covered. For a school of 250 students and 20 teachers the pricing page shows this at under eight minutes a week. If your pilot shows more than that, the case is made. If it shows less, you will have learned that cheaply.

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