You may have spotted the government’s latest plan to improve wellbeing among teachers and school leaders.

To my mind, much of the problem is workload, and the knock-on effect this has on your work-life balance.

This balance can often be pretty fragile. “What balance?!” I hear you cry. I can only keep my head above water in the working week by self-medicating with caffeine and those tiny squares of millionaires shortbread from Tesco.

My weekends are characterised by an involuntary twitch that means I look at my work emails on my phone every five minutes. My evenings are all too commonly spent finishing off admin that didn’t get done in the day.

I should declare at this point that I’m writing this piece on a Saturday morning.

A healthy work-life balance doesn’t necessarily mean no work at weekends. Technology and free-will mean we can work anywhere at any time. The trick is not to do it all the time.

Apart from the sake of our own sanity, there’s an important reason why we should take this approach. The tone we set for our staff is really important. If we are sending and receiving emails at all hours, then our teams will naturally feel that this is normal and may feel compelled to do the same.

This is wrong.

If you never switch off, you can never really be fully switched on.

Recharging your batteries

Unfortunately, the days when school leaders will feel it’s OK to switch off and can enjoy a realistic work-life balance can feel a long way off. Until we solve the funding crisis - which in many ways the biggest cause of stress and workload for leaders - a decent work-life balance week in week out is just a dream for most leaders.

But switching off - or at least recharging your professional batteries - is not just “nice to have” and is certainly not a luxury. It’s essential. That is why NAHT continues to run the Inspiring Leadership conference every year. It is two days of excellent CPD, in the company of your peers, stepping back from the day-to-day, reflecting on your own practice. And this year there’s a particular emphasis on wellbeing.

Modern school leadership requires expertise in many more areas than used to be the case. Legal, HR, finance, communications, payroll, you name it, it’s on your desk now and it’s not going away. You could get your local authority or a contractor to handle some of it for you, but if you pay out for that support, what else might you have to cut back on in order to afford it?

You could devolve a bit more responsibility for some of it to your extended leadership team in your school. But if you do, can you look them in the eye when it comes to their own workload and work-life balance?

But you’ll find a workaround because you always do.

And the government - any government - will always rely on you and expect you to do that. They will always expect you to put your own wellbeing just that little bit lower in the pecking order than everything else.

Some might say, that goes with the territory. Want to be a leader? Then suck it up. This is wrong too.

But this is the problem with the restless optimism of leadership. Of course, you always hope for the best, of course, you lead your school with just the right mixture of enthusiasm and pragmatism. But even if there’s only one child or one member of staff in your school who still needs more support, you can never be happy. You never feel able to rest.

It is difficult to be an optimist when it comes to support for staff and pupils. NAHT’s own research shows that members are finding it harder to access support for pupils who are entitled to it and are spending less on staff training because budgets are at breaking point.

So, that brings us back to funding.

Domino effect

Solve the funding crisis and you have a shot at solving the workload crisis. Solve the workload crisis and you make a giant leap towards solving the recruitment and retention crisis.

Solve the recruitment and retention crisis and you’ll make the most significant move to guaranteeing that every pupil will have the opportunity to learn and develop their skills and knowledge.

Campaigners who argue that we need more money for schools and colleges are all too aware of the very clear links between all of these issues.

At NAHT we favour the 10-year funding model that has been talked about lately.

But whatever strategy is adopted, the simple truth is that the government has to put its hand into its pocket and dig deeper.

The restless optimists amongst us firmly believe that they will. We also won’t shut up until they do.

Paul Whiteman is general secretary of the NAHT union