The Problem With Photocopied Worksheets (And What You Can Actually Do About It)

If you teach in a UK secondary school, there is a reasonable chance that your week includes a non-trivial amount of time at the photocopier. Standing there. Watching it warm up. Hoping the toner holds.

You probably have a sense, somewhere, that this is not the best use of your time. You probably also have a sense that it is unavoidable. Both of those instincts are correct, and they are pulling against each other, which is part of why this never gets fixed.

Why you are at the photocopier so often

Worksheets are not the default because anyone decided they should be. They became the default because they solved a real problem.

When you are planning on Sunday night, a worksheet is the most flexible tool available. You can build one quickly. You can adapt it for a different class in five minutes. You can change it next year if the scheme of work moves. The cost is paper and toner, which do not appear on any budget line that anyone tracks.

That flexibility is genuinely useful. It is also why nothing has ever replaced the worksheet, despite roughly two decades of attempts to.

The problem is not that worksheets are bad. The problem is that the same flexibility that makes them useful for novel lessons makes them a poor fit for the lessons you teach the same way every year. And most teachers, when they look honestly, find that a meaningful slice of what they print is the same thing they printed last year, and the year before that.

That slice is where the cost lives.

The four hidden costs (and which ones are actually yours)

When people talk about the cost of worksheets, they usually mean paper and toner. That is the cost the school’s finance team can see. It is not the cost that matters.

The cost that matters is split across four places. Two of them are yours. Two of them are not, and it is worth knowing the difference.

1. Recreating resources you already had

Most teachers cannot find the worksheet they used last year. It is on a hard drive somewhere. Or a shared drive nobody can navigate. Or it left with the teacher who built it. So you rebuild it — not from scratch, because you remember roughly what was on it, but you retype, redesign, and reformat. The version that goes through the photocopier this year is slightly different from last year’s. Next year it will be different again.

This is not laziness. It is what happens when no system holds a resource in place between uses. The DfE’s Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders survey has consistently shown planning and preparation as one of the largest workload categories in secondary teaching, and resource recreation sits inside that figure.

What is actually in your hands here: keeping a personal record of which resources you reuse year on year. Not a system. Just a list. A note in your planner. A folder on your desktop labelled “things I print every September.” When the conversation about workload happens — and at some point it will — that list is what makes the case concrete. “I have printed this same set of seven worksheets every year for four years” is a different conversation to “worksheets take up a lot of time.”

2. Different classes getting different versions

If two of you teach Year 8 history and use different worksheets for the same lesson, that is not a teacher failure. It is a department-level question about whether anyone has agreed which version is the version. Most departments have not. The instinct, when this is noticed, is usually to write a tighter scheme of work or hold a meeting about consistency. Neither of those things actually fixes it, because the resource itself never carried the consistency. It was always going to drift.

What is in your hands: noticing it. If you sit in a department meeting and realise that you and a colleague have been teaching parallel classes from materials that have quietly diverged, name it. Not as a complaint — as information. Most HODs do not know how much drift exists until someone tells them.

3. Pupils losing the sheet within a week

A worksheet is a piece of A4 paper. It has no spine, no fixed location, and no inherent reason for a fourteen-year-old to look after it. By the end of a term, a Year 7 pupil has been given somewhere between forty and a hundred of them. Some are stuck in. Some are folded into bags. Some are at home. A few are intact. Most are not.

When you ask the class to revise from the worksheet on photosynthesis from three weeks ago, half of them cannot find it. That is not because they are not trying. It is the predictable behaviour of a format that was never designed to be kept.

The pupils who do well in this system are not better at learning. They are better at admin. That is worth knowing, because it changes what you do about it.

What is in your hands: for the worksheets that genuinely matter — the retrieval grid you want them to revise from, the source extract for the assessment — being more deliberate about where it goes. A specific page in the book. A folder section. A clear “this one is staying with us” instruction. You cannot fix the system, but you can mark the resources that are load-bearing differently from the ones that are disposable. Most pupils can hold this distinction if it is stated clearly.

4. Lesson time spent distributing and sticking in

Distributing a worksheet takes a couple of minutes. Sticking it in takes more. Explaining which side, finding scissors, dealing with the pupil who has already lost theirs. Five to ten minutes per lesson where a worksheet is in play. Across a department, across a year, that is curriculum time.

What is in your hands: being honest about which worksheets need sticking in. If a sheet is going to be referenced again, it needs a permanent home. If it is a one-off practice task that will be marked and recycled, it does not. Treating both the same way is what eats the time. Some teachers run a “sticking-in moment” once a week instead of every lesson — a small change that frees up small amounts of time consistently.

What is actually going wrong (and why it is not your fault)

The four costs above are not random. They share a structural cause: most schools treat all worksheets as if they were the same kind of resource, when actually they fall into two very different categories.

There is the worksheet you write for one specific lesson because you had a new idea or the class needed something particular. That worksheet is genuinely temporary. It does its job once and then disappears. The system handles it well.

And then there is the worksheet you have printed every year for four years because it is the way Year 9 learns cell structure in your department. That worksheet is not temporary. It is a permanent part of your curriculum that the school is treating as if it were disposable. That is the mismatch that produces the four hidden costs.

You have probably felt this without putting it into words. The lesson you teach the same way every year deserves a stable resource. The lesson you teach for the first time deserves a flexible one. The system you are working inside does not distinguish between the two, which means the stable lessons are running on resources that drift, get lost, and have to be rebuilt every year.

That is not a teaching problem. That is a design problem in the curriculum infrastructure of the school. It is one of the reasons a half-decent department can still feel chaotic to be inside.

What you can actually do this term

You are not going to fix the curriculum infrastructure of your school. That is not your job, and the people whose job it is need a strong evidence base to act on. So the most useful thing you can do — for yourself and for that eventual conversation — is small, specific, and worth doing regardless.

One. Keep a list, for one half-term, of every worksheet you print that is the same as one you printed last year. Not the lesson-specific ones. The repeats. You will be surprised how many there are, and the list itself becomes the evidence.

Two. Mark the difference between disposable and load-bearing resources for your pupils. Out loud. Repeatedly. “This one we are keeping. This one you can throw away.” It is a small change that takes seconds and improves the chance that the worksheets you actually need them to revise from survive long enough to be useful.

Three. When the conversation about workload comes up — in a department meeting, in a CPD session, in the inevitable September staffroom moan — bring the list. The hidden cost of worksheets is invisible until somebody puts numbers on it. Most HODs will be grateful that someone has.

Four. Notice which of your repeats are also being printed by colleagues teaching parallel classes. Those are the resources where consistency would matter most. Flag them. You do not have to propose a solution; you just have to make the problem visible.

The wider question

If you are a Head of Department, a Curriculum Lead, or someone with leadership responsibility for resource design — the question this all leads to is narrower than “should we stop using worksheets?”.

The better question is: which of our worksheets come out of the photocopier every term, year after year, without fail? And are we treating those resources differently from the ones we genuinely write fresh each time?

Most departments, when they audit honestly, find that ten to twenty per cent of their photocopied worksheets fall into the first category. The same retrieval grids. The same source extracts. The same vocabulary tables. The same writing frames. That ten to twenty per cent is where the recreation cost lives, where the inconsistency lives, where the lost-sheet problem is most damaging — because these are the resources pupils need to be able to find later.

What you do with that information depends on subject, phase, and how the department teaches. It might mean consolidating the repeats into a workbook for one specific unit. It might mean embedding the load-bearing pages directly into exercise books. It might mean a knowledge organiser that consolidates the reference material the worksheets were trying to deliver in fragments. We have written separately about how schools think through that decision — the curriculum books overview covers the format choice, and the exercise books vs workbooks comparison is the most direct read for departments deciding between consolidating and embedding.

But the prior question is the one worth sitting with first.

Which of your worksheets comes out of the photocopier every term without fail? Start there. The rest follows.