Why we can't remove teacher admin work

Teachers log behaviour incidents into platforms because they are told to, not because it helps students.

This type of admin benefits the bureaucratic system, run by administrators who balance their true care for teachers with the registration-related, financial, political and legal obligations they juggle.

Two pieces of Australian research published in the last five weeks illuminated what I've watched over the past 15 years: a continual increase in teacher workload, compounded by the siloed platforms they are required to navigate. The expectations put onto schools lead to the purchase of additional platforms that hold additional data that the schools use to defend their decisions. And the documentation ultimately falls on the teachers.

Why do school leaders need behaviour incidents logged?

When I came to Australia, I saw straight away the need to log student behaviour incidents in the school's system. When parents called the office insisting that meetings about student issues be escalated to me, I needed to know the background.

If the background wasn't in the system, I spent the day interrupting teacher's classrooms or planning time to find out what I might expect from the parent.

In the years that I was carrying an instructional load, I had even less time to catch up with teachers about the stories behind incidents. Rather than judge them for the missing information, I quietly knew that I didn't always log the behaviour incidents I asked others to log.

Like me, the teachers responded to what we sometimes referred to as, 'the tyranny of the urgent.'

The stakes for missing documentation are high. Carolyn Wade and Natalie Thackwell of Griffith University interviewed 14 primary school leaders in Queensland and New South Wales (Wade and Thackwell, 2026). One leader explained: "if something happens, you document it, or it didn't happen." Another: "I try to send a follow-up email straight after a phone call, just to have it in writing, even if we sorted it out verbally."

How much time does behaviour logging take teachers?

A recess incident often cost me 90 precious after-school minutes, the same 90 minutes I had for planning and marking. I drafted where the incident happened, what happened prior, the triggers, what I saw and heard, what each person said, and how I followed up. I then opened up the many tabs, clicked the dropdowns and found one of the students who needed the behaviour logged. Repeat for others. I turned the story into a draft email for the parents and others in the school who might need to know more urgently. Those were entered into a separate messaging system after looking up the necessary contact details.

Greg Thompson and colleagues studied time use among Queensland state school teachers, who record behaviour incidents in the OneSchool system (Thompson et al., 2026):

• 1,623 teachers logged 4,386 randomly allocated half-hour slots of their working day.
• In each 30 minutes, teachers reported an average of 71 minutes of tasks.
• "Managing and responding to student needs/behaviour" was the most common reason teachers gave for feeling rushed.
• It was named on 78 per cent of the days teachers said their workload was not manageable.

In the school case studies, teachers described where the time goes. One early career teacher described a 70-minute lesson in period four becoming "probably an hour to an hour and a half of admin in the afternoon": short reports, ticked boxes, phone calls home, then recording the phone calls. Another described copying each email she sent a parent and pasting it into a separate section of OneSchool, then doing it again when the parent replied. Double-handling.

Experience doesn't fix it. The researchers found experienced teachers were just as caught as beginners, because the same data entry comes back with every incident.

Why don't we just record less?

Because missing behaviour and learning data is a legal risk and a financial cost to the school.

The Thompson study records what happened when Queensland's Education Minister ruled that minor incidents no longer needed to be recorded. Teachers weren't sure what counted as minor. And a deputy principal explained why her school still wanted them: "If you don't have the minors, you don't have the pattern." Without the pattern, she said, the school doesn't have enough evidence for the NCCD, which its funding is based on.

Behaviour incidents are often evidence for the NCCD's social/emotional category.

What happens when schools insist teachers log more?

Often our best intentions have unintended consequences. By insisting that teachers log large amounts of evidence, they are unintentionally incentivising teachers to do one of three things:

1. Work longer hours
2. Quietly not do the entries
3. 'Shadow use' tools that will get it done faster

Teachers don't want to do the wrong thing. They are simply responding to choices between staying late and getting their own children to sport training. Choosing between a weekend with the family or hours of catching up with the planning and marking that were set aside to do incident reports.

Doesn't AI speed things up?

Behaviour incidents shouldn't go through traditional LLMs like ChatGPT unless they are through a secure, tenanted school environment or through a tool with a school data privacy agreement. An incident report names children and may also constitute a health record.

Even with an LLM, typing up an incident saves little time. The teacher still sits at a desk, still types the account, still copies the result into the school's system. The chatbot makes the transition from report to draft email a bit quicker. The teacher is still opening multiple parts of a schools system to find the relevant tabs, buttons and parent information.

Is it hopeless?

Using the technology schools currently use, yes. But schools must think beyond traditional platforms and chatbots.

Most people think of AI as a chatbot. We're moving into the age of personal AI assistants. Like a human PA, AI personal assistants can take direction, know where to find the information they need, and draft personal responses. When the responses are approved by the human, the personal assistant can file them in the correct area of a platform.

The direction can be given as a quick, spoken note between classes or on the walk back from yard duty.

We built Teacharo as a solution to the problem of teacher admin. It can't be removed without an entire overhaul of the Australian government and legal expectations of schools.

But we can control who (or what) carries that admin load.

Which of the three is your school quietly relying on?