Picture a Year 6 teacher on a Sunday evening. An artificial intelligence (AI) tool has drafted her parents’ evening letter in two minutes and turned a reading comprehension into three versions for different groups before the kettle has boiled. It is genuinely useful. She still closes the laptop at half past nine. That gap, between jobs that get quicker and weeks that stay just as long, is the most honest finding I have seen yet on AI and teacher workload. It comes from Bett’s latest national survey of United Kingdom (UK) teachers.
In short: Bett’s third annual YouGov survey of 1,033 UK teachers, carried out in June 2026, found that eight in ten now use AI for teaching-related tasks and weekly use has doubled in a year. Half of those users say AI has cut their workload, but only 35% say they actually work fewer hours. Two in five teachers have had no training from their school, and expectations for next year have cooled sharply.
What the Bett survey found
The report, AI in Education 2026: Working it out (full report), is the third in a series that Bett, the education technology show, has commissioned from YouGov. It is sponsored by Lenovo, which is worth keeping in mind, but the survey was run online by YouGov and weighted to represent UK teachers, with fieldwork from 16 to 29 June. Bett’s report page has the background.
Use has moved fast. In 2025, 26% of teachers used AI at least weekly. This year it is 52%, and 12% use it every day. Age matters more than role or phase: net use is 87% among the under-35s and 62% among the over-55s.
Among users, 76% build lesson resources such as plans and worksheets with it. Around four in ten draft letters and emails to parents (39%) or pupil reports (39%), 15% write references and 13% contribute to paperwork for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Only 8% let it near marking. For all the talk of automated assessment, the red pen is staying in teachers’ hands.
AI and teacher workload: quicker tasks, the same week
Here is the heart of it. Among teachers who use AI, 51% say it has reduced their workload, 40% say it has made no difference and 9% say it has added to it. Yet when asked about time, only 35% say they work fewer hours. More than half (55%) work the same hours as before, and 4% work more.
The savings themselves are modest. For regular users the most common answer was one hour a week (20%), with two hours close behind (19%). Rolled together, the report puts the typical saving at a little under two hours a week. That fits the controlled trials. The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) ChatGPT lesson preparation trial found that Key Stage 3 science teachers using the tool with a guide spent 25.3 fewer minutes a week on planning, a 31% cut. The more recent Aila trial, which we covered in our piece on what the Aila trial found about AI lesson planning, put the saving at about 49 minutes.
Older teachers feel the benefit least. Just 26% of over-55s say they work fewer hours, against 41% of under-35s. Bett is also careful to say that its questions and answer options have changed across the three waves, so the jump from 34% reporting a lighter workload last year should be read with caution.
Duncan Verry, Bett’s portfolio director, puts the pattern neatly in his foreword: “The time comes back and something else fills it.” The report’s own conclusion is blunter. AI is “just not the workload cure it was once billed as, and teachers have worked that out for themselves.”
Where the saved time actually goes
I do not think this is a failure of the technology. It is a feature of schools. Time saved by one teacher, on one task, rarely comes back as a shorter day, because nobody has decided what it is for. The report shows the same gap at school level. When teachers described why their school had adopted AI, cutting teacher workload (52%) came far ahead of improving pupil outcomes (15%).
Imagine a head of science who saves forty minutes a week on a homework quiz bank. Within a month, that time has quietly gone on a new tracking spreadsheet and an extra intervention group. The space simply filled, as space in schools always does. If leaders want AI to change working hours, they have to protect the time on purpose, in the calendar, before it disappears.
A tool that saves you forty minutes is only a gift if someone decides, in advance, where those forty minutes go.
The professional cost nobody is timing
A second, smaller study published this month asks a harder question. Writing for the British Educational Research Association (BERA), Dan Walker of Rawlins Academy and Professor Ash Casey of Loughborough University report what 104 secondary teachers in England said about AI for lesson preparation, followed by seven interviews. It is a voluntary sample from a master’s study, so treat it as a snapshot.
The group split almost evenly: 48% said they used AI for lesson preparation and 52% said they did not. Around 40% worried about the professional cost, mainly that colleagues would come to depend on AI and lose competence. About 34% felt early career teachers (ECTs) were unlikely to have built the foundations needed to plan well, and 71% of teachers in their first five years used AI, compared with 26% of those with more than twenty years in the classroom.
The Bett report carries the same worry in an opinion piece by Alice Whitby, a teacher development lead. She describes how working through pupils’ responses builds a teacher’s expertise, and writes: “That cognitive friction is gold dust.” Her concern is that “we mistake removing cognitive effort for improving practice, when some of that effort is the very mechanism through which expertise develops.” It is the teacher’s version of the cognitive offloading problem we usually discuss for pupils.
I find that persuasive. A newly qualified teacher who never wrestles with sequencing a unit on fractions may save an hour now and pay for it for years. An experienced teacher who hands the parents’ letter to a chatbot loses nothing at all.
Training, policy and cooling expectations
Teachers are working most of this out alone. Two in five (41%) have had no AI training or help from their school, a small improvement on 46% last year. Where training exists, it is thin: 16% get it once a year and only 2% more than once a term. Teachers in independent schools are more likely to get support (61%) than those in state schools (41%).
Policy is patchy too. A third of teachers (33%) say their school has a policy on staff use of AI, 48% say it has none and 19% do not know. Even where one exists, only 18% say they understand it well.
Enthusiasm is levelling off. Fewer than half (47%) expect to use AI more next year, down from 68% in 2025, and those expecting a big increase have fallen from 15% to 3%. I read that as realism rather than rejection. Teachers have found the jobs AI helps with and stopped expecting it to rescue the week.
What I would do as a school leader
Decide where the time goes before you save it
If a department adopts AI for report comments or quiz banks, agree in the same meeting what the saved time is for. It might be one fewer after-school meeting each half term, or a protected planning hour in the timetable. Without that decision, the evidence suggests the hours will simply be absorbed.
Treat early career teachers differently
For ECTs, I would keep core planning deliberately effortful, with AI used for the genuinely tedious parts such as differentiating a worksheet or drafting retrieval questions. A mentor should then talk through what the teacher changed and why. Our list of practical ways teachers can use AI is a reasonable starting menu for those lower-stakes jobs.
Train on real tasks, and measure hours
Short, practical sessions on the jobs staff actually do, including when not to use AI, will beat a one-off launch. Then ask staff about hours worked as well as whether AI feels helpful. The Bett figures show those two answers can be very different.
AI is already part of most teachers’ weeks. The question for the next year is whether schools treat the time it saves as something to plan for, or let it vanish into the next initiative.
Does AI reduce teacher workload?
For many teachers it lightens particular jobs rather than the whole week. In Bett’s 2026 survey of 1,033 United Kingdom (UK) teachers, 51% of those using artificial intelligence (AI) said it had cut their workload, but only 35% said they worked fewer hours, and 55% worked the same hours as before.
How much time does AI save teachers?
Usually a modest amount. Regular users in the Bett survey typically saved a little under two hours a week. In an Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) trial, science teachers using ChatGPT with a guide cut their weekly planning time by 25.3 minutes, or 31%.
What do teachers use AI for most?
Lesson resources. Among teachers who use AI, 76% create plans and worksheets with it, 39% draft letters or emails to parents and 39% write pupil reports. Only 8% use it to mark pupils’ work.
Should early career teachers use AI to plan lessons?
With care. In a survey of 104 secondary teachers in England, reported for the British Educational Research Association (BERA), about a third worried that early career teachers (ECTs) relying on AI could miss the learning that comes from planning lessons themselves. Using AI for routine jobs, with a mentor reviewing the output, is a sensible middle way.
Has AI given you any time back, and if so, where has it gone? Tell me in the comments.
