Mental Health in Schools: The Issue of Teacher Mental Health

With recent research by the University of York showing that more and more teachers around the world are burning out and walking away from the incessant demands placed upon them, the crisis in our education system is borne out by record numbers of teaching professionals seeking support for their mental health.

If we are to empower schools to improve children’s mental health, we have to find meaningful ways of taking better care of our teachers.

Student mental health and teacher mental health go hand in hand; you can’t truly improve one without tackling the other. Comprehensive schemes of work for students, such as Muse Wellbeing can certainly help, but a genuine commitment to supporting teacher mental health is just as vital. 

The Data on Teacher Mental Health

The following statistics from the Education Support Partnership Teacher Wellbeing Index 2023, give an idea of the scale of the crisis, with rising numbers of teachers seeking support for their mental health year on year:

• 78% of education professionals have experienced a mental health issue in the past academic year
• 89% of senior leaders and 78% of school teachers reported feeling stressed
• 36% of school teachers reported experiencing burnout, a 9% increase from 2022
• 51% of staff experience insomnia or difficulty sleeping
• 73% of staff thought inspections were not fit for purpose
• 71% of staff thought inspections negatively impact their mental health and wellbeing.

Workload… and More Data (Groan)

Clearly, workload, including demands around the seemingly endless pursuit of data, and a culture of unrelenting accountability and blame, are intrinsic parts of the problem.

There is a growing body of research to show the factors which most contribute to work-related stress within teaching and generally in the workplace. Among these factors, lack of autonomy, unmanageable volume of work, lack of support, and being micromanaged rank highly.

My Own Motivations for Leaving the Profession

My own decision to exit the profession after having worked in schools for nearly 20 years was driven by these very issues. The relentless pressure, lack of support, and the overwhelming workload made it impossible to maintain a healthy work-life balance.

❌ the increasingly all-consuming nature of working in schools, which meant I had to work 13+ hour days during the week and at least 1 full day on weekends, leading to me showing more and more signs of occupational burnout

❌ frustration about the lack of professional autonomy I experienced

❌ ethical concerns I had about aspects of the curriculum – the primary English grammar curriculum being a case in point

❌ misgivings about the direction of education, for example how schools are increasingly run as businesses, and the conflicts that can arise when trying to advocate for students’ needs within an environment where financial profitability and maintaining a brand image have become the bottom line for many schools

❌ lack of support for my own mental health after I suffered a bereavement

❌ hearing similar stories from many friends and former colleagues working in schools in the UK and internationally, with toxic work cultures in schools and lack of genuine regard for teacher wellbeing seemingly becoming the norm rather than the exception.

Words about a school’s ethos written on a school website or in a prospectus are just that… words.

And let’s be honest, most schools’ mission statements say pretty much the same thing.

Back to my own story…

Once I achieved my goal of becoming a SENDCo and member of Senior Leadership, I started becoming more and more disillusioned by my inability to effect real change for the better for students and colleagues who I genuinely cared about and wanted to help.

The backdrop of budgetary constraints and slashed resources in terms of money, headcount and time, also became ever more real and stifling.

Firefighting in school on a daily basis, and then returning home to continue working in evenings and on weekends in a bid to keep on top of an ever-growing to-do list, I was left with no semblance of work/life balance.

My own physical and mental health deteriorated as I approached burnout, leaving me less and less able to serve the children in my care.

Hearing similar stories from friends and former colleagues working in schools in the UK and around the world made me realise that just changing schools didn’t seem to be the solution.

To my mind, the bigger picture was that the education system itself seems broken.

Record Numbers Leaving the Teaching Profession… and More Data (Yay!)

Official statistics show that only 80% of people who qualify as teachers in the UK go into the profession.

1 in 3 teachers quits the classroom within their first five years.

The number of teachers working in state-funded schools in England has fallen to its lowest level since 2013, official statistics show.

In addition to workload and over-accountability, teacher mental health is further impacted by the stress of having to deal with the threat of verbal and/or physical aggression from students, and sometimes from parents.

I’ve worked in schools both in the UK state sector and the international independent sector where parental abuse towards teachers and other staff was largely ignored by senior management.

My colleagues were usually not backed up by school leaders, and increasingly such incidents of parental aggression became par for the course.

The possibility of being on the receiving end of abuse from students or parents is a horrible reality of the job in many schools, and constitutes a further undeniable strain upon staff mental health and wellbeing.

Are We Missing the Point?

I have worked in schools where initiatives implemented around staff mental health and wellbeing have, in my opinion, missed the point entirely.

In two schools where I worked, the decision was made that re-painting the staff room and buying new crockery and cutlery were key ways of improving staff wellbeing.

In one school, it was decided that fresh flowers were to be placed in the staff room weekly and in other key places around school.

This floral initiative was regularly touted by our Headteacher as a wonderful morale booster, but did not prevent almost all teaching staff leaving the school’s employment at the end of the academic year.

I know of several schools in which a mandatory yoga or mindfulness class has been implemented in a bid to improve mental health of teachers and other staff, often in addition to the regular weekly staff meeting.

I find myself questioning how helpful such initiatives really are and whether in many cases they are counterproductive.

Such ‘Forced Fun’ activities, as they often come to be known, take away from prime administrative after-school time and add extra time to the working day.

As well-meaning as such initiatives may be, they are superficial, misguided and piecemeal remedies for profound and complex systemic issues.

A new lick of paint in the staffroom and extra time in school practising yoga can only go so far in papering over ever-widening cracks in the way our education system is run and the resulting damaging effect on many teachers’ mental health.

Psychoeducation for staff about the signs of burnout and staff wellbeing programmes to promote stress reduction strategies, as well as counselling for school staff, are measures that are far more likely to yield real results. 

Teacher Mental Health and Wellbeing – Just One More Box to Tick?

My honest view is that all too often, Senior Leaders in schools are in danger of paying lip service to staff mental health and wellbeing, rather than actually doing anything meaningful about it.

I do not think that this is necessarily intentional – more likely, it’s that in the long list of tasks which need to be handled with ever-dwindling resources, tackling mental health is denigrated to being just one more thing to do.

Having been a member of Senior Leadership in two schools, one in the state sector and one independent, I believe the reality is that mental health and wellbeing of teachers – and sometimes of students – are too often relegated to mere box-ticking exercises.

Mental health runs the risk of being trivialised because many senior staff within schools lack the time, resources, knowledge and/or the will to effect real change which would truly positively impact the mental health of their school community.

Conclusion: Teacher Mental Health

There is a mental health crisis in our schools. Without addressing teachers’ crippling workload, the culture of blame sustained by a flawed education system, and the resulting impact on teacher mental health, it will be difficult if not impossible to tackle the crisis in children’s and young people’s mental health effectively.

Rather than superficial and piecemeal initiatives around teacher wellbeing, systemic changes are needed, both at a school level and at a national policy-making level, so that educators feel cared for and can in turn positively impact the mental health and life outcomes of children and adolescents.

Despite the UK government’s pledges around initiatives for teacher retention, I find myself sceptical about seeing any real change for the better. I sincerely hope I’m proved wrong.

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Shabnum Hasan is the Founder of Mentally Well Schools and Associate Lecturer on the ‘MSc Mental Health & Wellbeing in Education’ at Buckinghamshire New University. A former SENDCo and Senior Leader in schools in England and internationally, she has 20 years’ experience in education, and is now a counsellor and psychotherapist supporting teacher mental health. 

Mentally Well Schools is an online platform of free mental health and wellbeing resources, paid evidence-informed programmes, and CPD training to improve student and staff mental health, including DfE (Department for Education, U.K.) quality assured Senior Mental Health Lead courses. www.mentallywellschools.co.uk