Teacher paperwork: which administrative tasks a school can take off teachers

October's strikes have put teachers' workload back at the centre of the debate in Spain. In the open-ended strike in Madrid's state schools, which began on 14 October, the unions behind it argue that teachers spend "an excessive part of their working day" on administrative tasks, and are asking for at least one full-time administrative assistant in every school.

The available data point the same way. In the national survey on teacher paperwork by the UGT public services union, with 7,600 responses collected between 6 March and 7 April 2025:

• 67.86% spend 6 to 10 hours a week on bureaucratic and administrative tasks: 43.34% between 6 and 8 hours and 24.52% between 9 and 10.
• 72.45% say they suffer very high stress levels as a result.
• 51.73% say education platforms fail or cause problems often or too often.

Almost nine in ten responses came from state-school teachers, where much of the paperwork is set by the authorities. In a state-funded private or fully private school, the owner has more room to decide who does what. This article proposes a way to use that room.

Not all paperwork is the same

Before taking tasks away, it helps to sort them into three groups:

• Documented teaching work. Schemes of work, curriculum adaptations, assessment reports, minutes of assessment meetings. Good templates can simplify it, but it belongs to the teacher.
• Classroom administration. Collecting absence notes, trip consent forms, money for an outing, signed letters or data forms. Almost none of this needs teaching judgement.
• Duplicated work. The same data written two or three times: attendance on paper and then on the platform, marks in a spreadsheet and then in the report card, a notice by email and again by messaging app.

The second and third groups are the ones a school can genuinely reduce, and they are usually the most irritating, because they feel like wasted time.

What the school can take off teachers

• Absence notes. If families report and explain absences through the app, the form tutor does not have to collect notes or chase them. Attendance is taken once, on a phone or tablet, and stays recorded.
• Consent forms and letters. The ones families sign digitally are tracked by the office, which knows who is missing without asking in class. We explain it in electronic signature of consent forms.
• Money in the classroom. Trips, materials or books are charged on the invoice or through the platform, not in cash in class.
• Repeated notices. A single official channel and templates for frequent notices avoid writing the same thing through three routes. If the school also sets communication hours, teachers are not answering messages at ten at night, as we explain in the right to disconnect from families.
• Marks written twice. If grades are entered once and the report card comes from there, the intermediate spreadsheet disappears.
• Procedures that belong to the office. New enrolments, changes of contact details, certificates or grant applications should go straight to the office, without passing through the form tutor.

Where AI helps and where it does not

Artificial intelligence can take on part of the writing: preparing the draft of a notice, summarising what a meeting agreed, translating a message into a family's language or suggesting a first version of a reply. In every case, the teacher or the team reviews and decides before anything is sent.

There are two clear limits:

• The judgement is the teacher's. AI can organise observations, but it does not assess the student. An assessment report is signed by the person who made the assessment.
• Sensitive data do not go into just any tool. Health information, special educational needs or family circumstances should not be entered into general AI tools without data protection guarantees. Spain's Ministry of Education says so in its guide, which we summarise in the Ministry of Education's AI guide.

How to start in one term

1. Ask before deciding. Ask a group of teachers to note, for two weeks and in 15-minute blocks, the administrative tasks they do and how long they take.
2. Sort each task into one of the three groups above.
3. Remove duplicates first. It is the quickest step and causes the least debate.
4. Move to the office whatever does not need a teacher.
5. Automate what is left if it is repetitive: notices, reminders, absence notes, invoices.
6. Measure again at the end of the term using the same method and share the result with staff.

Conclusion

Teacher paperwork will not disappear by decree, but a large part of it is neither teaching nor necessary: it is classroom administration someone else could do, or the same data written several times. A school that measures how much time goes on those tasks, removes duplicates and moves to the office whatever needs no teaching judgement gives hours back to teachers without touching a single scheme of work.

If you want to see how Ena, Edena's AI, prepares notices and messages with the school's context so that your team reviews and confirms them, meet Ena or book a demo.