Dr Alastair Smith looks at the Independent Welsh Pay Review Body’s recommendations, what delivering it could mean, and what overlooking it could risk.
In 2024, the Independent Welsh Pay Review Body (IWPRB) published a Strategic Review of the teaching profession. The IWPRB advises Welsh Ministers on teachers’ pay and conditions. Drawing on comparative data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the review found Wales has the second-highest teacher working time of any country in the OECD, behind only Japan. That echoes what teachers themselves have reported: the Education Workforce Council’s 2021 National Workforce Survey found full-time teachers in Wales reported working an average of 56 hours a week.
Wales’ response to this situation, the new Strategic Education Workforce Plan for Schools, does a lot of things right. Published in March, it commits to protected time for school leaders. It promises to strip back the paperwork burying schools. It sets out, in more detail than any previous Welsh Government document, a genuine plan to tackle workload. But something is missing from it, and fixing that gap could let Wales do something no other UK nation has managed.
A general commitment to reduce workload is hard to measure and easy to quietly deprioritise when budgets tighten.
One of the Strategic Review’s recommendations had real teeth. It called on the Welsh Government to develop a workload reduction plan to secure ‘full and consistent adherence’ to the Working Time Regulations 1998 (WTRs) by September 2027. This gave a familiar problem something most workload initiatives lack: a specific legal standard and a deadline. A companion recommendation went further still, proposing an actual cap on weekly teaching hours within teachers’ contracts, subject to impact assessment. That would be a genuinely novel step for the sector.
This commitment deserves to be taken seriously, because the legal standard behind it is a strong but underused one. The WTRs cap the average working week at 48 hours. They also place a duty on employers, not just an aspiration, to take active steps to make sure that limit is respected. School staff have long been assumed to sit outside this protection, treated as though the ‘unmeasured working time’ exemption in the regulations applies to their working day. That assumption has been legally shaky since 2006, when the European Court of Justice forced the UK Government to rewrite its own working time law. The Court ruled that the exemption could only apply where the whole of a worker’s time, not just part of it, is genuinely unmeasured. Almost no teacher’s week meets that description. Timetabled lessons, statutory meetings and inspection deadlines account for a great deal of it, whatever else is left unstructured.
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That 2006 correction has sat quietly in UK law for nearly twenty years, largely unapplied to schools. The IWPRB’s 2024 recommendation was, seemingly, the first serious sign that a UK education body had noticed the gap between the law as written and the practice on the ground, and had put a specific date on closing it.
That is what makes it striking that the September 2027 commitment does not appear, by name, anywhere in the Strategic Education Workforce Plan published in March. The 26-page document contains welcome, concrete action on workload and wellbeing. But the specific legal anchor the IWPRB gave that work in 2024 seems to have been absorbed into softer language, rather than carried forward as a distinct, trackable commitment.
Teachers’ pay and conditions have been devolved since 2019, so Wales can set its own working-time standard for the profession entirely independently of Westminster.
This matters practically, not just symbolically. A general commitment to reduce workload is hard to measure and easy to quietly deprioritise when budgets tighten. A commitment to full and consistent adherence to a specific legal limit, by a specific date, is one that unions, the Senedd and staff themselves can actually hold government to.
There is a flip side to this, which is worth naming plainly. The IWPRB’s recommendation is, in effect, an acknowledgment from a government-appointed body that the Working Time Regulations are the right framework to judge teachers’ and leaders’ hours against, and that adherence to it does not yet exist. That acknowledgment does not disappear if the Workforce Plan leaves it unaddressed. It remains available to any teacher, leader or union weighing up whether hours worked breach the 48-hour limit, and to the Senedd committees that will scrutinise how well the Plan’s other commitments are delivered. Wales does not have to wait for that scrutiny to arrive before acting on Recommendation 18. It can choose to lead on it instead.
Wales still has two live processes it can use to close the gap.
The first is already under way. Wales’ teachers’ pay and conditions document is currently being amended to secure protected time for school leaders, following IWPRB recommendations. That drafting process is a natural, immediate home for the legal standard that went missing from the Plan. Protected time framed explicitly with reference to the WTR, rather than as a general goodwill measure, would give leaders something considerably more enforceable.
Wales would become the first UK nation to give teachers and school leaders genuine, monitored protection under working time law.
The second is a few years further out, but no less real. The Workforce Plan itself commits to reviewing the IWPRB’s remit on pay and conditions within the next three to five years. That review is an obvious moment to build WTR compliance monitoring formally into the IWPRB’s ongoing role, turning a one-off recommendation into a standing part of how conditions for teachers and leaders in Wales are assessed every year.
Here is where Wales has a genuine first-mover opportunity. Teachers’ pay and conditions have been devolved since 2019, so Wales can set its own working-time standard for the profession entirely independently of Westminster. It does not need to wait for England to act, and English policy on this question shows no sign of moving. The legal groundwork already exists, thanks to a European court case the UK Government lost twenty years ago. Wales does not need new legislation, a new inquiry or a change of legal position to act on this. It needs to reconnect a commitment it has already made, through a process it has already recognised, to the deadline it has already set.
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If it does, Wales would become the first UK nation to give teachers and school leaders genuine, monitored protection under working time law. That protection would sit not as an aspiration attached to a wellbeing strategy, but as an enforceable standard with a date attached. The Workforce Plan’s own machinery is already moving on leaders’ protected time and on the IWPRB’s future remit. This is not a distant ambition. It is a small, deliberate addition to work already in progress.
You can read about the political and legal analysis in greater depth here.
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