AS TEACHERS BEGAN industrial action last week, the leader of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) claimed that Irish primary school teachers spend more time working with pupils than anywhere else in the world.
Speaking on Newstalk Breakfast on 5 October, John Boyle, the INTO’s general secretary, said: “Irish primary teachers do the most hours in the world, in terms of 910 pupil contact hours.”
Days when teachers are working, for example by training, but are not supervising children, are not included in this count.
Boyle detailed some of the work that teachers engage in, warning that the work-to-rule action that day could escalate into strike action (as it did this week).
Some examples of other work teachers do cited by Boyle included covering for absences and being on standby to supervise playgrounds, which Boyle said amounted to 43 hours a year.
These hours should count as pupil contact time, and we’ll account for these later.
First, let’s focus on the central question: do Ireland’s primary teachers work the most hours in the world in terms of pupil contact hours?
INTO response
In response to The Journal’s inquiries about Boyle’s claim, an INTO spokesperson cited the findings of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) annual Education at a Glance reports, going back to 2023.
They also included links to INTO’s own coverage of these reports.
The OECD is a group of an intergovernmental organisation of 38 developed countries, including Ireland, that regularly compiles and publishes statistical data about topics such as education, and allows for trends to be spotted and compared across these countries.
However, these reports rarely make statements about the entire world, given that their focus is only on the participating countries, none of which are in Africa or South Asia.
Even with that caveat, a more basic problem presents itself: if Irish primary school teachers “do the most hours in the world”, this wasn’t mentioned in any of the press releases that the INTO linked to in its email.
These reference higher class sizes and low wages, but do not mention Ireland having the world’s highest number of pupil contact hours with teachers.
The closest claim to the one mentioned by Boyle on the radio was given in a 2024 INTO press release.
“The average teaching hours in the primary sector across the OECD is 773, while Ireland’s primary teachers work 17% longer, with 905 hours per year,” that release reads.
In other words, the INTO’s release says Ireland’s teaching hours are higher than the OECD average – but the release did not say these hours are the highest in the world.
Their figure of 905 hours also differs slightly from Boyle’s figure of 910.
OECD data
All of the above claims are from the INTO, which in turn cites the OECD as the source of their data. What does the OECD’s research say?
The Journal contacted the OECD about the claim, and asked whether there were better measures of pupil-contact hours rather than teaching time, or if the INTO may have been referencing data that has not yet been publicly released.
They directed us to publicly available datasets on the working time of teachers.
The most recent set of that data was released along with the latest Education at a Glance report, published at the end of September.
This report includes a section on the teaching time of teachers, including a separate section for primary school teachers.
The OECD methodological notes say that teaching time is calculated as “the net contact time for instruction”.
It excludes time allocated for lunch breaks, short morning or afternoon breaks, and days that the school is closed for holidays.
For the Irish figures, statutory teaching time was used to count the number of hours, meaning that the OECD’s figures came from contracts and other documents, rather than a survey of actual teaching time.
In other words, the figures for Ireland are based on how much teachers should teach rather than how much they actually do teach.
This is not the case for every country counted in the OECD’s figures; a document full of the different ways that other countries count their figures was included with the release.
Boyle also said in his Newstalk interview that teachers can have additional contact – beyond those 905 hours – with pupils outside scheduled classes, for example by supervising playgrounds.
Both Boyle and the OECD put that additional figure at 43 hours a year.
However, as both the OECD’s email and the INTO’s press releases cited teaching hours as making up the bulk of pupil contact time, this is primarily what we’ll compare.
Ireland is not on the list for the most recent OECD figures; our data across this entire section is missing for 2026.
In an emailed response to requests for clarification, the OECD said that this was because “Ireland did not submit any data to the OECD in the corresponding data collection”.
The OECD explained that similar data is released every two years, meaning that the last relevant release for Ireland was in 2024.
That dataset (downloadable here) shows that, on average, Irish primary school teachers taught for 905 hours a year, compared with an average of 773 a year — tallying exactly with INTO’s press release.
But did we have the most teaching hours for primary school teachers in 2024?
Ireland’s figure was above average for the OECD, but it was not the most hours recorded in the OECD, let alone the world.
Costa Rica appeared to be the highest, at 1,227 hours, followed by Chile at 1,006 hours. Ireland’s figure is also slightly lower than the United States, which stood at 908 hours.
The Irish figure is the second highest recorded by the OECD for an EU member state; the Netherlands was higher at 940.
Of the EU’s 27 member states, 22 are also in the OECD.
Figures for Scotland were also included (though not the UK as a whole) in the OECD report, and teaching hours there were also lower than Ireland’s, at 855.
In all, we appear to rank about 7th in the OECD’s 2024 figures, behind Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United States.
A similar result occurs if you compare the 2024 Irish figure with the more recent 2026 release that had data on most countries, but which excluded Ireland (downloadable here).
Again, Costa Rica and Chile top the chart with only minor reductions in teaching hours (1,274 hours and 1,003 hours respectively).
New Zealand, however, drops from 917 hours, down to 855 hours, lower than Ireland’s 2024 figure.
Other hours
Ireland’s figure of 905 teaching hours is high, but it is not the highest. On Newstalk, Boyle had mentioned that teachers also sometimes need to cover classes in the absence of other teachers.
This is a fair point in the context of the union talks, though does not need to be taken into our calculations: the same amount of time teachers spend with pupils is being spent regardless of whether the teacher was scheduled to teach that day, or was a substitute.
In other words, if one teacher has to do an additional pupil contact hour as a substitute, it is because another teacher is doing one hour less. The average doesn’t shift.
Boyle also said that teachers can be on standby for 43 hours a year due to playground supervision.
Even if we were to assume that primary school teachers in the rest of the world do no such supervision, adding this time to Irish teaching hours would bring us to 948 — far above average, but still far short of the highest in the world.
The above assumption isn’t merely theoretical; OECD notes suggest that some countries include supervision time in their tally of teaching time.
The Journal has contacted INTO again about these conclusions, but has not received a response at the time of writing.
Verdict
The statement that Irish primary teachers do the most hours in the world, in terms of pupil contact hours, is FALSE. As per our Reader’s Guide, this means that the claim was inaccurate.
When asked to back this claim, the INTO cited OECD figures, which included teaching time as well as additional supervision hours.
However, the OECD figures from 2024 suggest that Irish primary school teachers typically performed about 905 teaching hours. This was above average for the OECD on the whole and the second highest of the EU countries they had data on.
Even adding on the 43 supervision hours performed annually by Irish teachers, this is not enough for them to top the scale.
More recent figures were released in 2026. These suggest the overall situation has not altered dramatically, though this latest dataset does not include figures for Ireland.
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