One of the perceived major benefits of a job in teaching is the holidays that staff get at half-term and during the summer.

However, a new poll has found many teachers are in fact spending their holidays working on classroom-related admin. Around a third of teachers spent more than 50 per cent of this half-term break doing excess school work, according to a new TES survey.

The research quizzed 1,000 teachers and revealled many of them used their own free time to catch up with lesson planning, coursework marking and additional bureaucracy. One in ten of the teachers that TES spoke to said they have spent over 70 per cent of their time off performing school-related work.

One respondent in the poll calculated that they would get two days out of ten off as there would be no other time to catch up on the paperwork. They added many people outside the profession would not believe how much extra work goes on behind the scenes.

Another teacher responded by saying that half-term needs to be thought of as work from home week.

Teaching unions have been saying for sometime that the workload placed on staff in the industry is unfair and as a result are preparing to strike next month in order to get the government to reconsider many of its current policies.

Speaking in response to the survey, National Union of Teachers deputy general secretary Kevin Courtney said: "It comes as no great surprise that so many teachers find their half-term consumed by work.

"Successive workload surveys have shown the extraordinary additional hours the profession puts in. Teachers also increasingly tell us that much of their work is not about preparing better lessons or providing good feedback."

He added past research has shown that almost two-thirds of teachers believe more than a fifth of their workload has no benefit to children's learning.