Sinéad Mc Brearty, CEO, Education Support
Our 2023 Teacher Wellbeing Index highlighted troubling findings across the sector, including:
- 8/10 staff report stress, rising to 9/10 school leaders. This echoes findings from the Government’s own Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders report as well as from the Health & Safety Executive.
- 60% of teachers say that the organisational culture of their workplace has a negative impact on their personal wellbeing.
- Education staff report rates of loneliness at work that run at twice the national level, and are even higher again for educators from minoritised ethnic backgrounds. Loneliness and stress are each risk factors for suicide. 8% of senior leaders report acute stress and loneliness at work.
- 35% of all staff report experiencing signs of burnout, rising to 40% of senior leaders.
However we cut it, the workforce is not in good shape.
There are of course factors in the wider system that drive some of these outcomes. School funding and the impact of the increase in child poverty are widely seen as sources of pressure on schools. Insufficiency of capacity in wider public services creates a spill over effect into schools. And the high stakes associated with the accountability regime is routinely cited by educators as having a disproportionately negative affect on their personal wellbeing.
Notwithstanding these factors, and more besides, there is no doubt in my mind that there are a variety of important intervention points with which trust leaders can engage in order to effect improvements for morale and staff retention. Below, I offer four provocations for leaders to consider.
I) More ruthless prioritisation
I know this sounds practically impossible, but I believe it is critical. There is more demand on schools than they can manage. The only meaningful change will come from either an increase in resource, or a decrease in scope. There’s no more money on the horizon, so we have to double down on scope if we are serious about reducing workload.
The number of hours people work each week is not necessarily the most important aspect of workload, but it does matter. The World Health Organisations says that working more than 55 hours per week constitutes a "serious health hazard”, associated with significantly higher risk of stroke and heart disease. According to government research, on average, full time teachers work 52.4 hours and full-time leaders work 58.2 hours per week. In addition, stress is linked with musculoskeletal conditions, compromised immunity and dementia, among other health risks.
The type of work also matters. Empty work (bureaucratic, unsatisfying tasks that don’t appear useful) frustrates teachers. Professor Francis Green has highlighted the relative increase in work intensity (the rate of mental input to tasks) for teachers and the decline in task discretion relative to other professions. This drives reduced job quality and reduced job satisfaction.
We also know that poor work-life balance has a significant negative impact on personal wellbeing. Educators report poor work-life balance and an inability to switch off from work. This is likely to be partly a consequence of stress, but is also linked to the increased emotional content of their workload in response to the increasing need reported by children and young people e.g. SEND, SEMH, poverty-related distress and difficulty.
In the absence of sufficient resource, educators will leave the profession demoralised and exhausted. We have seen a steady rise in attrition over the last decade and unless something changes, it will continue to rise.
Ruthless prioritisation is the last option left to us. No-one wants to cut provision for children and young people below current levels. But if we fail to manage excess workload, we will lose the very staff on whom great educational outcomes depend. We have to ruthlessly prioritise now so that we still have staff around in three, four and five years’ time.
II) Protect space for professional judgement
Through our work with education staff across the country, we observe recurrent themes of managerialism, centralisation and standardisation. This presumably brings some benefits or efficiencies across families of schools, but it is also connected to declining job quality and job satisfaction among professionals.
A key challenge for trust leaders is to contain, or "right-size” the bureaucracy and managerial oversight for schools. Ensuring that school staff have the space and opportunity to exercise their professional judgement is part of improving job satisfaction. In particular, it is important to attend to Robert Karasek’s findings that the combination of high demand and low control over workload is a recipe for stress.
III) Privilege the collective
We need to work together to create new cultural norms for school workplaces. Too many schools are not nice, or even tolerable, places to work. To create sectoral change, we must avoid blame and shame, and focus instead on supporting improvement and normalising higher standards of workplace wellbeing. This is not to say that we put the needs of adults above those of children. Rather, it is recognising that our collective inattention to the needs of adults is now jeopardising the quality of education that children can receive.
Knowing that we need to improve our workplaces will not magically enable us to do so. Significant investment is required in relational skills. We have to make space for professionals to fail (safely) and to then reflect, learn and try again.
We have brilliant leaders across the country, taking radical action to improve our workplaces. Collectively however, we need to work together to raise the bar for all and not just in exemplar pockets. Our ability to work together and to create pathways for positive cultural evolution will determine how well the sector matures into a reliable place for satisfying, generative careers. This in turn will require us to envision new cultural norms and to update our mind-sets, beliefs and assumptions to achieve a step change.
IV) Work less
Trust leaders have operated at the frontier of the sector over the past decade. As is customary for frontier folk, most have worked tirelessly to grow and stabilise their base. Whilst this has been done with noble intentions, one side-effect has been to contribute to the "more is better” doctrine of workload. In the sector, it is normal to believe that being a great educator means working around the clock, always on, always contactable. Although this has become normal, it isn’t healthy, sustainable or even necessarily effective.
There is a productivity paradox in working harder/longer. For most people, the more they work, the more stress they internalise, the less time they make to de-stress, the higher their level of emotional exhaustion, which in turn increases disengagement, cynicism and ultimately burnout. Many leaders don’t experience this pattern in themselves. Some of us thrive on the buzz and urgency that goes with the job. But whether we recognise stress through its problematic symptoms, or actually enjoy feeling wired, either way the stress will take a toll unless we address it in a timely way.
Through our work we see the huge health cost that stress places on leaders who do not switch off. We routinely see teachers and support staff who do not distress and who consequently experience lower job satisfaction than they otherwise would.
The research literature is clear: we do better quality work when we are well and rested.
One of the most powerful actions trust leaders can take to change the workforce’s relationship to workload is to role model working less. This will be a challenge to the identity and practice of many leaders, but until we show that we can do this job differently, we will struggle to lead meaningful change for our workforce.
Working in education presents a fantastic opportunity to do something that really matters. Teachers join the profession with deep commitment and a strong sense of purpose. Collectively, we have to do a better job at nurturing, developing and sustaining our talent pool. We can’t be glib about the challenge: the words are easy to say, but change is difficult to operationalise. Nonetheless, I truly believe that together, we can build a happier, healthier system in which well supported adults bring their best to work in service of our children and young people.
The CST Blog welcomes perspectives from a diverse range of guest contributors. The opinions expressed in blogs are the views of the author(s), and should not be read as CST guidance or CST’s position.
