Teachers work 52 hours a week. Only 23 are spent teaching.
A study of nearly 15,000 Filipino teachers measured where the week actually goes. Ancillary work alone takes 17.8 hours — nearly double what policy allots — and the official record cannot see most of it.
A nationally representative study of nearly 15,000 Filipino public school teachers found that the average teacher works 52 hours a week, weekends included.
Of those, 23.4 hours are spent teaching.
That is 45% of the working week in front of a class. The other 55% — about 29 hours — goes somewhere else, and the study is unusually specific about where.
Where the other 29 hours go
| Hours/week | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Teaching | 23.4 | 45.0% |
| Ancillary work | 17.8 | 34.2% |
| School-related assignments | 8.1 | 15.6% |
| Informal and administrative | 2.7 | 5.3% |
Ancillary work is the big one. That is 3.56 hours a day on teaching-related tasks — lesson preparation, instructional materials, checking and grading.
DepEd policy allots two hours a day for exactly this work. Teachers are spending nearly double it.
The part that will be familiar
Inside those 17.8 hours, the study breaks down where the time actually goes:
- Curriculum delivery — 28.6% (preparing instructional aids and materials)
- Curriculum planning — 27.0% (lesson plans, LAC sessions)
- Assessment — 23.6% (checking and grading)
Roughly four-fifths of ancillary time is spent preparing to teach and marking what was taught. Not paperwork in the bureaucratic sense — the actual craft of the job, taking twice the time policy assumes it takes.
Teachers also carry an average of five school assignments on top of teaching. Around 35.7% coordinate programmes for external agencies; 31.2% handle non-teaching roles like guidance or clinic duty, often because no one else is there to do it.
Why nobody can see it
The most quietly damning finding is that there is no system that records any of this.
The Daily Time Record captures 8:00–12:00 and 1:00–5:00. Work taken home, done in the evening, or done on a Sunday is not captured anywhere. As the brief puts it, those hours "are not wholly visible to DepEd."
So the 52-hour figure is not a complaint. It is a measurement of something the official record was never designed to see — which is why a teacher's lived experience and the department's picture of teacher workload have been able to disagree for so long.
What actually changes it
ReadWhat to set up before Term 2 starts
Most of this is structural, and no app fixes it. Class sizes, the diversity of learning levels in one room, the absence of guidance counsellors and SPED specialists, the missing support staff — the brief's own recommendations are about staffing standards, workload tracking and policy review, not about teachers working smarter.
The honest smaller point is this: curriculum delivery and assessment are 52% of ancillary time, and some of that is preparation being done from scratch that has already been done elsewhere.
A teacher building a review activity from a blank page on a Sunday is doing work that exists. That is the slice a ready-made, MELC-mapped library actually addresses — not the 52 hours, and not the systemic causes, but some share of the hours spent making materials that could have been opened instead of built.
Everything in the SlideQuest library starts playable, with its questions editable, so the only preparation left is the part only you can do: putting your section's questions in it.
Try in SlideQuestOpen a ready-made classroom gameOpens in your browser. No student accounts needed.
Read it yourself
The full brief is worth twenty minutes. It is the clearest account of Filipino teacher workload published, it is based on a genuinely representative sample, and it is unusually direct about what the department can and cannot currently see.
EDCOM 2 and IDinsight, Understanding Teacher Workload as a Systemic Issue — findings from a study of 2,283 schools, 2,246 school heads, nearly 15,000 teachers and 1,713 Administrative Officers, conducted with DepEd to inform national staffing standards.