Ask a teacher who has left a small school why, and the answer is rarely the teaching. It is the evenings: the lesson that had to be planned from nothing because nobody had written the course down, the marking that arrived in a pile every Friday, the seven different preparations for seven different classes, the feeling that the school ran on their unpaid hours and would not notice until they stopped. Workload is the reason most teachers leave, and most of it is not teaching. It is the work around the teaching — preparation, marking, admin — and it is the part a school can actually change.
This cluster is the operations view of that problem. The first article is about onboarding and allocation: how a new teacher inherits the school's way of working in their first week, and how load is distributed so that nobody is carrying seven preparations while a colleague carries two. The second is about what the platform automates and — as important — what it does not, with the one outcome claim we are prepared to make and its caveats. The third is the method: a five-question survey that gets you a before-and-after number from your own staff, without timesheets, so that you can measure it rather than take our word for it.
A new teacher should inherit, in their first week and in this order, the curriculum they are teaching, the materials that go with it, the assessment format, the attendance and safeguarding policies, and the standard for what parents see. A teacher handed a class and a login and left to it will build their own version of all five, competently, and the school will discover the divergence at the first parents' evening, when one class has weekly quizzes and reports and the next has neither. Onboarding is not a welcome pack. It is the transfer of the school's way of working to a person who will otherwise invent one.
The transfer is only possible if the way of working exists somewhere other than in the head of the teacher who left. A written curriculum by level, shared materials, an assessment format, a report template — these are the assets that make a school more than its current staff, and the first article sets out the minimum set and the order to build them in. On SprintUp the curriculum, activities and quizzes live in the campus by course and are visible to every teacher assigned to it, which is the mechanical part; the decision to write it down is the school's.
Schools count load in contact hours because contact hours are what they pay for. Teachers carry load in preparations: the number of different classes they must plan, resource and mark each week. Twenty hours across three levels is a sustainable job in which the teacher gets better at three things; twenty hours across seven is seven lessons a week planned from scratch and seven sets of marking, and it produces a resignation in the spring term. When you allocate classes, watch the second number, and treat a timetable that keeps every teacher under four preparations as worth a less tidy grid.
Fairness is the other half of allocation. In any school some hours are better than others — the evening classes that pay more, the exam groups that are satisfying to teach, the Saturday morning nobody wants — and a school that allocates them by habit produces a silent hierarchy that every teacher can see and nobody can question. Decide the rule, say it, and apply it. The first article covers the rule options and the records a school should keep on its staff, which are fewer than most schools think and more than most schools keep.
Preparation — planning lessons, building activities, writing quizzes — and marking are the two largest blocks of non-teaching time in most teachers' weeks, and they are the two that generation compresses. A course outline, a lesson plan, a set of differentiated activities and an exit quiz can be generated on SprintUp's relax lane without a meter, on every plan including the free one, and edited rather than written. That changes the shape of the work from authoring to reviewing, and reviewing is faster than authoring by a margin that depends on the subject, the level and the teacher.
We are careful about claiming what that margin is, because this market is full of numbers with nothing behind them. What we can say is this: in a one-term pilot at Intellect Academy — our sister school — teachers reported that lesson preparation and grading time fell by roughly half. That is one school, one term, self-reported, and owned by the same company as SprintUp. It is not a controlled study and not a promise of what every school will see; it is the reason the platform was built the way it was, and we are now measuring the same thing with schools that are not ours. The second article sets out where teacher time actually goes, which parts generation removes, and which parts — the marking of written work, the judgement in the room — it does not.
The only workload number that should change a decision in your school is one from your own teachers. Timesheets do not work — teachers will not keep them and the ones who do distort them — but a five-question survey, asked before a change and again a term later, produces a before-and-after figure that is honest enough to act on: hours a week on preparation, hours on marking, hours on admin, what they would do with time freed, and whether they would recommend the change. Six answers, reported as six answers, are worth more than any vendor's percentage, including ours.
The third article gives you the survey, the wording, the timing and the arithmetic that turns hours freed into teaching capacity or evenings returned. It is the method we now use ourselves, and it is the method by which the sentence in the previous section will be checked against schools that are not ours. If your school runs it, we would like to see the result, whatever it shows.
How teachers join and are allocated, what the platform takes off their evenings and what it leaves, and how to measure the difference in your own school before believing anyone about it.