Ask a teacher why they never have time for the student who is quietly struggling, and the honest answer is usually the same: the day is full of everything that is not teaching. The numbers back that up, and the Swedish government has now made it the subject of a formal inquiry.
How teachers actually spend their time
Skolverket’s national mapping of teachers’ working time, “Lärarnas yrkesvardag” (RAPPORT 385, 2013), had 3,626 grundskollärare register how they used their time across a term. Teaching was the single largest activity, but it still came to only 34 percent of their work-related time. As the report puts it, grundskollärare use “34 procent av sin totala tid till arbetsrelaterade aktiviteter till att genomföra undervisning” (Skolverket, RAPPORT 385).
The rest is spread across everything else. After teaching, the most prominent categories, each taking roughly another 10 percent of the time, were administrative and practical work, planning lessons, the assessment and documentation of students’ development, and care and order. The study is now over a decade old, but there is no sign the balance has shifted back toward teaching since.
The government has noticed
In March 2025, the education minister received a government inquiry with a title that says it plainly: “Tid för undervisningsuppdraget” (time for the teaching assignment), SOU 2025:26. Its remit was to propose measures that reduce teachers’ administrative and other tasks so that time can be freed up for teaching, and to look at how teaching time is regulated (SOU 2025:26).
The inquiry’s own framing is blunt. The teaching profession has become steadily more complex, the number of tasks has grown, and administrative, practical, and student-social work that belongs to the school’s wider mission keeps getting pushed onto individual teachers. The stated aim is to “freda tid till undervisningsuppdraget”, to protect time for the teaching assignment. An inquiry is not yet law, but when the state formally investigates why teachers cannot teach, the problem is not in doubt.
For neurodivergent students, a lot of the “rest” is documentation
Here is where it matters for the students Nuro exists to help. A meaningful part of a teacher’s non-teaching load is the documentation attached to students who need extra support. Under Skollagen, a school that provides särskilt stöd must document it in an åtgärdsprogram, review it, and revise it. Skolverket’s own working-time report even counts “samtal om åtgärdsprogram” among the non-teaching activities that eat into the day.
So the students who most need a teacher’s attention are, paradoxically, attached to some of the paperwork that pulls that attention away. It compounds a system already short on capacity, from too few special-education teachers to principals who say they lack the resources and an understaffed elevhälsa. The right to support exists; the time and the system to deliver it are what run short.
Where Nuro fits
Nuro does not take a teacher’s judgment out of the loop, and the professional decision about what support a student needs stays with the school. What it does is take on the part of the work that is genuinely mechanical: turning what is happening with each student into the written record. Nuro can draft the documentation of the adapted support a student is getting, ready for the teacher to review and approve, so the same act both frees teaching time and produces the compliance trail Skollagen asks for. For a profession that spends two-thirds of its time on things other than teaching, giving even part of that back is not a small thing.