I was the RS teacher in the other thread who said I thought RS teachers work bloody hard. Please note, I didn't say they work THE hardest, but that they can often have to work harder than most others in terms of marking, parents' evenings and so on... I think English teachers have to work bloody hard too.
I think for all subjects there is a rub, and a give...
For example - with PE - the rub is that you have to do lots of after school clubs, but the give is virtually no marking. Therefore, a lot of PE teachers I know manage to work a very packed in 9 - 5 job, but take very little home.
I think all subjects have their 'rub' the bit that is the hardest about teaching that subject and their 'give' the thing that is easiest.
Now, with RS - the 'rub' is the fact that you tend to (along with other subjects like Drama) only teach students for 1 hour per week, whereas in the schools I taught in, most other lessons such as Geography and History would teach students for 1.5 hours a week. Thereby, at KS3 at least, you tend to see a lot more students per week. And, if you teach in high achieving academic schools with high standards (like I have done), then that means more marking, more reports, more parents' evenings and so on... Simply because of the increased volume of students.
Then, the schools I have taught in have expected RS teachers to offer extra lunch time classes to allow students to bump up their short course GCSE to full GCSE and all the extra work that goes along with that - but this is just an extra, not timetabled of course!
The other rub, I have found with RS, is that as a subject without a national curriculum there can be very few resources on a particular topic. I'm not talking unsuitable books that you need to adapt, but literally for some points that your particular LEA might have dreamed up, there may be nothing at all on that and so, you might well have to research the lesson and write all the resources from scratch. This can be very time consuming, but usually is sorted after a few years.
Now, the 'give' for RS teachers is that you have less planning to do - because you can, in effect, recycle the lesson. I acknowledge that. But, In my fourteen years of experience, I have found that most teachers (from all subjects) after a few years of teaching, tend to recycle last year's lesson plans and just tweak them for the current class. I know very few experienced teachers who completely rewrite their lesson plans each year. Most teachers say adapt their lesson plans from previous years, so the notion that RS teachers have this gain, is in my opinion not much of a 'gain' because relatively speaking, as an experienced teacher planning takes up relatively little of my time. I think most experienced teachers agree with that.
Thus my point is that RS teaching can be time heavy, because the things that you invest the initial time in and then re-use year after year (schemes of work, lesson plans etc) so are not time heavy for an experienced teacher - the RS teacher gains in, but the aspects of teaching that are very time heavy each year (marking, report writing, parents' evenings) - there are no short cuts to doing this properly (if you work in a good school, and do a good job), and so the work load for this for the RS teacher is constantly high.
But I did not say that we work the absolute hardest, just it is a bit of a cinderella subject because you do have to do so much more marking, report writing and so on, yet everyone just dismisses your subject out of hand (as has been seen on here and the other thread!)