Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what her policy is on unnecessary paper work.

We are continuing our extensive work with the teaching profession to remove unnecessary workload. This will allow teachers to concentrate on teaching, rather than bureaucracy and paperwork.

We established three independent review groups to address the three biggest issues emerging from our 2014 Workload Challenge – unnecessary workload around marking, use of planning and resources, and data management. We published their reports on 26 March 2016. They allow teachers and school leaders to challenge unproductive practice and provide an opportunity to reassess and streamline policies and processes using their clear principles.

We have accepted all the recommendations for Government from those reports. Our action plan, published on 24 February this year, shows that we are fully committed to doing more.

The report on the findings of the first biennial survey on teacher workload, published at the same time, confirms that the Government was right to focus on these three major causes of unnecessary workload in schools.