LaQueen,
It is not necessarily that but often down to the expectations of the head / SMT.
Take for example, two schools I taught in:
School 1:
Expected to maintain close relationships with parents and tuttees. Expected to organise and run school socials for my tutor group, to contact parents if there were any problems with tutees, and to deal with any problems with my tutor group. Teachers were expected to contact parents via email, and respond to any issues parents had in the first instance.
Expected to report to parents three times a year. Term 1: written reports, term 2: parents' evening, term 3: full written reports. Initial written reports were about 100 words, with summer written reports being 250 words (bearing in mind I taught over 400 students a week). All reports had to be individually written and we were not allowed to copy and paste. All reports were checked by SMT. For parents' evening, there were two per year group except sixth form. This means that I had to stay for 14 parents' evenings over the spring term. That was pretty much every week.
Expected to participate in extra curricular activities such as house evening, help out at discos and so on.
There were schemes of work, but each teacher was expected to write their own lessons and to prepare their own resources. You didn't have your own classroom, so you had to take everything to the classroom with you when you needed it. Every teacher had to do three duties a week (one lunch, one break and one before / after school) for which you got lunch but was expected to eat this with the students.
School was split site, and teachers had to walk between the two sites every lesson.
Teachers were expected to run school detention, including Saturday morning detention.
School two:
Teachers were not to have contact with parents. That was the role of the head of year. Parents were not to email teachers directly, but any issues were to go through the head of year.
Reports were written once a year, and then there was parents' evening once a year. I did 7 parents' evenings and wrote the same number of reports, but we used word banks to generate the reports, so that took hours to do, as opposed to days in the first school.
There was no expectation that I would be involved in anything extra curricular at all. Very few staff did,
Schemes of works and lessons plans were written with complete set of resources. I was free to make up my own lessons if I wanted to, but I wanted to use the set lesson, I could literally just walk in, grab the lesson plan and the resources and teach. I had my own classroom with all the resources to hand.
I did not manage any detentions, this was organised by senior team. I only did break duties, but no lunch duties.
Both were state schools. At school A, I could be seen working an 80 hour week at busy times, with 50+ being the norm. At school B, a 50 hour working week would be towards the bust week, with 40 being the norm.
Did I suddenly become more organised when I started teaching at school B? No, the expectations were different, they were much lower (although this school was not as middle class / high achieving, so classroom management was much more of an issue).
It's naive to think that the amount of work a teacher does is simply related to how organised they are. As I said in my very first post, there are too many other factors involved such as the subject the teacher teaches, the age and stage taught, number of students in a class, and perhaps most importantly expectations of SMT. In my experience (16 years), schools differ massively in what they expect of their staff, as has been shown on this thread!