Working time recording in schools: why a school is not an office

A school has working days that look nothing alike

The same school has teachers with different timetables every day, teaching and non-teaching hours, tutor time, staff meetings and other meetings, cover duties and covering for absent colleagues, which may be assigned at short notice. Around them are support staff, lunchtime supervisors who work an hour and a half, after-school club staff who start when much of the workforce is already leaving and employees who may work across several buildings.

On top of all that comes a calendar organised around the school year rather than the calendar year. That is why a clocking system designed for an office can do its job perfectly well in a conventional company and cause constant problems when it is installed in a school.

What working time recording currently requires

Royal Decree-Law 8/2019 (Spain's working time recording rules) amended Article 34 of the Workers' Statute (Estatuto de los Trabajadores) and introduced the obligation to ensure a daily record of each employee's working hours, including the specific start and finish times. It is therefore not enough to have a monthly total of hours or to state what the scheduled timetable was; the record must reflect what actually happened each day.

The obligation also applies to schools and makes no distinction between teachers, support staff or lunchtime and activity staff. In addition, records must be kept for four years and remain available to employees, their legal representatives and the Labour Inspectorate. This means the school has to do more than collect the data correctly: it must be able to keep it, find it and hand it over when required.

Not keeping it, keeping it incomplete, not retaining it for four years or not allowing it to be consulted is a serious infringement under Article 7(5) of the Law on Social Order Infringements and Penalties, carrying a fine of €751 to €7,500 following the amendment made by Law 10/2021. The fine is rarely the most expensive part: without a record, the school has no evidence on the day someone claims overtime.

This last point is particularly important when choosing a tool. Recording arrival and departure is just part of the problem. The system must make it possible to retrieve a specific person's information months or years later, keep the history and provide a record that can be understood without having to reconstruct it by hand from spreadsheets, emails or different apps.

A teacher's timetable and the working time record are different things

This is probably one of the most common misunderstandings in a school. Teachers already have a very detailed timetable: which lessons they teach, when they have a cover duty, which hours are tutor time or which meetings are scheduled. That timetable is indispensable for organising the school, but it does not replace the working time record, because it reflects what was supposed to happen, not necessarily what did happen.

The Labour Inspectorate's Technical Criterion 101/2019 states that the record must be daily and that presenting the general timetable, the work calendar or shift rotas is not enough. It also indicates that different means can be used to keep it, provided the system gives access to reliable and accessible information. The judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union of 14 May 2019 in Case C-55/18, CCOO v Deutsche Bank, also refers to the need for an objective, reliable and accessible system that cannot be altered afterwards.

That is why it makes little sense to try to turn the academic timetable directly into the employment record. The first serves to organise the school's activity; the second must prove the hours actually worked. The two sets of information can be linked, but they serve different purposes.

The underlying problem: in a school, timetables change all the time

A recording system works well when it can treat the reality of the people using it as normal. And that is precisely where many general-purpose tools run into difficulties. A teacher may start at a different time on Monday and Tuesday, have a meeting after lessons on Wednesday and cover for an absent colleague on Thursday, something that was not in their plan at the start of the week.

Non-teaching hours are also part of the working day. Department meetings, staff meetings, assessment meetings, parents' meetings or certain cover duties do not disappear from the record because there are no pupils present. If the software automatically compares each clocking against an identical timetable every day, it will end up treating as exceptions many situations that are completely normal in a school.

The complexity grows when the rest of the workforce is brought in. A lunchtime supervisor may work just a very specific time slot, after-school club staff have another timetable and administration works a different day from teachers. In school groups it is also common to find people who work at more than one site. If the tool does not allow for these situations, the school ends up dealing with them through manual adjustments, and the more manual work the system requires, the harder it is to keep it accurate throughout the school year.

Part-time staff deserve particular attention

Part-time work also carries specific obligations that a school needs to keep in mind, precisely because this kind of working pattern is common among lunchtime and activity staff and in certain services. Article 12(4)(c) of the Workers' Statute states that part-time employees' working hours must be recorded day by day and totalled monthly, with the employee given a summary of the hours worked and that documentation kept for at least four years.

Failing to meet these obligations properly can have particularly significant consequences, as the rules provide for the presumption that the contract is full-time unless proven otherwise. This means that precisely the shortest working patterns, which may seem the easiest to manage, are among those that require the most attention to documentation.

A system designed for education should be able to produce these summaries without forcing the school office to prepare parallel calculations in Excel every month. If complying properly with the part-time rules means taking data out of the software, adding it up by hand and then preparing a separate document, much of the benefit of having digitised the record is lost.

A school's calendar is not a conventional company's either

The calendar adds another difficulty. A school has national, regional and local public holidays, but it also has to work with the school calendar, which sets teachers' holidays, and these are not requested one by one as in an ordinary company. And it has its own days: the patron saint's day, open days, culture week, personal days. In an institution with several schools, there may also be sites in different municipalities and therefore with different local holidays.

Add to this something very simple but important: the school's activity is organised by school year. For a school, September marks the start of a cycle far more clearly than January. The workforce may change from one year to the next, timetables change, new groups appear and much of the planning is done with September to June or July in mind.

A tool that works well with calendar years alone can later force reports and calculations to be adapted to a logic that does not match the school's. This does not mean the rules stop using calendar years where appropriate, but that the tool has to be able to work alongside the way the school actually organises its activity.

Before choosing the tool, decide how recording will be done

Technology cannot decide on its own what should count as working time or how certain situations are handled. Article 34(9) of the Workers' Statute provides for the organisation and documentation of the record to be established through collective bargaining or a company agreement or, failing that, by a decision of the employer after consulting the workers' legal representatives. That is why, in schools with a works council or staff representatives, part of the work has to be settled before choosing the software.

That is where aspects such as breaks, certain meetings outside normal hours, school trips or any other special circumstance affecting the working day need to be made clear. The applicable collective agreement must also be taken into account, because it determines many questions relating to the length and distribution of working time.

A good tool should then adapt to those decisions. The opposite – choosing a piece of software first and changing the way the school works to fit what it allows – usually creates more problems than it solves.

Missed clockings and corrections must be manageable

Every organisation has people who forget to clock in or out, but a school has situations that make it particularly easy. A teacher may go straight from a lesson to a cover duty, a lunchtime or activity supervisor may be looking after a group at the moment their shift ends, or someone may realise hours later that they did not record an arrival correctly.

That means the system must allow errors to be corrected. What matters is that a correction does not simply consist of changing a time and making the previous data disappear. There must be a record that a change has been made, what the original information was and who authorised it. Traceability protects both the school and the employee, because it makes it possible to explain later what happened.

An apparently perfect record in which anyone can change the hours after the event without leaving a trace offers fewer safeguards than one that contains corrections, all of them properly justified and documented.

What a recording system for a school really needs

When we design a solution for a school, there are some questions we consider particularly important. It is not enough for the app to let people press an ‘in’ button and an ‘out’ button. It also has to deal with everything that happens around those two moments over the following months.

In practice, the system should make it possible to:

• Record time easily from the devices staff actually use, including alternatives for those without a mobile phone or work email.
• Handle different timetables depending on the person and the day of the week.
• Work properly with both full-time and part-time contracts.
• Include school calendars, regional and local holidays and the specific circumstances of each school or site.
• Manage missed clockings and corrections, keeping a record of the changes and their approval.
• Keep the history for the required period and make it easy to find.
• Produce clear reports that can be handed over when requested by the employee, their representatives or the Labour Inspectorate.
• Provide the summaries required for part-time staff without redoing calculations by hand.

What to ask for in writing before signing

Once the recording method has been agreed with the legal representatives and the system requirements are clear, there are three things worth asking for in writing rather than verbally. They are the ones that are hard to claim later if they were not discussed in time.

• A real sample of the report that would be handed to the Inspectorate; a screenshot of the admin dashboard is not enough.
• How a time is prevented from being altered afterwards without a record, and who authorises a correction.
• What happens to the four years of retention if the school stops being a client.

Digital working time recording may continue to evolve

A regulatory change is also on the way. The Spanish Government began a project to develop regulations on working time recording and move towards a digital model that would make it easier, among other things, for the Inspectorate to gain access. The Council of State issued an unfavourable opinion on the draft in March 2026 and its approval was postponed: to date it has not been published in the BOE (Spain's Official State Gazette) and its content may change.

Until a new regulation comes into force, the obligations described above continue to derive from the current framework. In any case, for a school that already has an organised digital record, keeps its information properly and can retrieve a specific person's history in a few minutes, a move in the rules towards greater digitisation should be much easier to take on board than for one that still relies on paper sheets and manual processes.

Klok grew out of the particular needs of schools

At PenwinEdu we know this problem well because we work every day with schools and other educational institutions. And here we find something similar to what we have seen with Wi-Fi, IT support and phone systems: a general-purpose tool may be technically valid, but that does not mean it is designed for the situations that arise in a school every day.

For that reason we developed Klok, our time and attendance system for schools. The tool handles teaching and non-teaching hours, school calendars adapted by region and municipality, corrections subject to approval and reports on the daily record. The service starts from €1.50 per user per month, and signing the school up is free.

But the part we consider most important is not just in the list of features. Klok has been designed from PenwinEdu's experience working with schools and knowing how their staff are really organised over a school year. That allows us to understand that the problem is not over once someone has clocked in correctly: it comes when the office has to handle a cover arrangement, a part-time activity supervisor, a change of site, a local holiday or a correction three weeks later.

Recording working time should provide certainty, not more admin

The aim of working time recording should not be to pile up clockings, but to have reliable information that protects both the school and the people who work there. To achieve this, the system has to be easy to use, handle the normal exceptions of a school and keep a history that can be explained and handed over when needed.