The survey completed by the ACT Australian Education Union found more than 86 per cent reported the increase in administration and compliance tasks was getting in the way of planning the "best possible lessons".

Nearly all – 98 per cent – reported an overall increase in the amount of tasks they were required to do outside of teaching hours in the past five years.

ACT primary school teacher Nina Leuning loves her job but said the rise in admin work was getting too much. "I feel that this detracts significantly from the results I could be reaching with my students," Ms Leuning said.

She added that she thought the number of admin tasks meant less time for thinking out "thorough and engaging" lessons as well as timely feedback for student assessment tasks.

Others surveyed reported late working hours, including numerous hours on weekends, spent keeping up with paperwork.

An ACT Education and Training Directorate spokeswoman refused to comment directly on the survey, but said the territory had some of the lowest face-to-face teaching hours in the country under the current Enterprise Agreement.

The spokeswoman said this was 19 hours a week in secondary schools and 21 hours 30 minutes in ACT primary schools.

On top of this teachers are also required to attend staff meetings, parent teacher interviews, rostered supervision and professional learning "and other required professional or school activities".

The spokeswoman said admin tasks come under "professional responsibilities". Therefore hours are not explicitly set.

The agreement, which is currently under renegotiation as it expires on September 30, is practically the same in hours and workloads as five years ago in 2009.

Glenn Fowler, the union's ACT branch secretary, said this did not take into account "new ideas in education" that have come into schools during the past few years.

"The problem is that the burden for implementing these new ideas always falls disproportionately on teachers and school leaders," Mr Fowler said.

He said teachers surveyed were "saying loud and clear to their employer that they have had enough" to an "atmosphere of more and more bureaucratic tasks".

Liberal education spokesman Steve Doszpot said he was not surprised teachers were complaining about the burden of administration, given what he heard from teachers as he visited Canberra's schools. Mr Doszpot said it was during his second round of visiting every public school in Canberra, having started on the visits six years ago, and there was no question teacher administration had increased during the time.

He pointed to the requirement to do 20 hours of professional development a year and report on and evaluate what they had done, an important initiative but one that took time.

He pointed also to new absentee reporting requirements, and the national disability insurance scheme, which he said required teachers to gather data and write individual learning plans for children with special needs.

"Gradually they're being asked to do more and more," he said, the job going well beyond 8.30am to 3.30pm to include playground duty during school hours, marking, lesson preparation and increasingly onerous compliance.

As to the suggestion that teachers had some of the lowest face-to-face hours in the country, Mr Doszpot said teachers wanted to be able to spend more time, not less, on their core job – teaching children.

The survey should ring alarm bells, he said.

"It should be quite a wake-up call to both the minister of education and the directorate that there is something drastically wrong with the way the teachers are tasked at the moment. Teachers need to be listened to, to find out how these things are causing such concern."

- with Kirsten Lawson