In the Department for Education’s recent YouTube video, education secretary Damien Hinds goes on record and says: “Above all else, what matters is the person standing at the front of the classroom. That person is the key to education…”

It’s a timely realisation as schools face three key challenges to retention, particularly at about the four-year mark in teachers’ careers. Finding the demands of the job as it stands today unsustainable, some teachers branch out into alternative careers; some leave the country and teach aboard, and others burn out.

I’m indebted to Steve Waters’ comment at the bottom of a previous article signposting the studies by Christina Maslach on burnout. Her recent research, published in 2016, on mental health professionals bears a striking resemblance to the problems posed by the working conditions of teachers. Those who feel overwhelmed would recognise their inability to turn off as “a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job”.

The six domains she identifies - workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values - immediately resonate with the many education articles chronicling the excessive expectations placed on those in the classroom.

The unrelenting demands of our Ofsted-ready environment put teachers on a constant red alert. And in the relentless quest for progress outstripping that of competitor schools, narrow targets operate sometimes at the expense of broad-based values, causing dissonance for many.

The self-critical enemy within

Self-evaluation may save money, tell inspectors where to look and direct senior leaders to problem areas, but it also unleashes the self-critical enemy within. It’s all too easy to convince teachers that they need to do more. Titles of pedagogical literature tell classroom practitioners how to be excellent and outstanding. In this Darwinian struggle, the conscientious perfectionists desperately trying to live up to public expectations - and their own - burn out. 

It’s a sad irony that the people most needed - conscientious, self-critical, intelligent and altruistic - are precisely the ones to be most damaged in an increasingly critical micro and macro environment. 

The remedies or preventative action are a good diet, exercise and sleep. I wouldn’t for a minute discount the importance of any of these, having just had some excellent Inset on sleep from Evelyn Stewart from The British Sleep Society, who produced some compelling evidence to show the damage sleep deprivation causes to those working into the night.

Tackling workload and the open-ended nature of the job is a practical step forward. But conscientious professionals cannot just stop doing unproductive tasks as the workload reports urge them to do. They need permission in the form of an evaluation of the tasks central to good teaching within a national agreement.

‘A sense of who we are’

A couple of months ago I was researching wellbeing and was disappointed that there seemed to be so few case studies on teachers until I came across a study authored by McCallum et al, commissioned by the AISNSW Education Research Council and conducted with independent schools in New South Wales. Published in 2017, it focused only on teachers and used 191 international and Australian studies mainly from the last five to 10 years.

While heartening that there is so much research interest abroad into wellbeing, it’s a warning that if we don’t value teachers, then other countries with more enabling approaches will snap them up. No doubt some already have.

The definition produced by McCallum et al is ambitious:

“Wellbeing is diverse and fluid respecting individual, family and community beliefs, values, experiences, culture, opportunities and contexts across time and change. It is something we all aim for, underpinned by positive notions, yet is unique to each of us and provides us with a sense of who we are which needs to be respected.”

The emphasis on the relationship between the individual and community, on values and culture, makes it broad enough to tackle the six factors contained in Maslach’s model of burnout. But there cannot be a single policy or model to fit all because stress is so individual.  Perhaps the only way of tackling the risks of burnout is to place the teacher at the centre, working around their wellbeing strategies. 

In our current position, this nirvana is a long way off. 

Interestingly in an earlier work, McCallum also advocates an approach, especially for beginning teachers, in which the mentees are encouraged to approach difficult situations as joint problem-solving opportunities to build resilience.

Thus wellbeing is not just about preventing mental and physical ill-health, or about individual respect and empathic bosses - it’s a cognitive and social process enabling teachers to become part of the solution. In this way, control, reward, community, fairness and values could be restored to teachers to keep them at the front of our classrooms.

Yvonne Williams is a head of English and drama in the south of England and a member of NATE’s Post-16 committee