The wellbeing of senior staff must be routinely reviewed and college governance should be trained on how to manage a duty of care for senior post holders, a new report by the Further Education Trust for Leadership says. 

The report, written by East Coast College principal Stuart Rimmer, lays bare the distress that college principals and chief executives experience weekly.

The report reveals that 45 per cent of college leaders experienced “distress” three to five times a week, with 10 per cent experiencing it more than five times a week. 

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It sets out the causes and common factors of this distress, and presents recommendations for chief executives, college corporations and the sector widely. 

College leader wellbeing: recommendations for chief executives

1. Develop a deeper understanding of the literature around distress to enable more informed discussions and participate in formal training around leadership and wellbeing.
2. Create a self-care prescription against the key areas of stressors identified to create sustainable working behaviours.
3. Develop peer support networks to allow authentic engagement and mutual support.
4. Hold discussions with corporation chairs around duty of care and how college corporations can support healthier work-life balance and workload.
5. Engage further with senior staff around the issues of stress/distress to encourage a culture of openness where wellbeing and mental health are topics that are regularly discussed.
6. Consider bringing external support into college to provide safe support, such as professional performance coaches or formal mentoring programmes. 

Recommendations for college corporations

1. Engage with principals and chief executives to ensure that workloads are reasonable and sustainable. Ensure that principals have a wellbeing support package, which could include self-care plans, coaching and/or mentoring and training in wellbeing.
2. The wellbeing of senior staff should be considered routinely as part of governance review.
3. Ensure that impact assessments are understood through the lens of leadership wellbeing when corporate strategy is agreed.

Recommendations for the sector

1. Further research funding should be sought/provided to investigate more deeply the impacts of distress in various leadership roles for the FE sector.
2. Training should be provided to leaders in identifying and proactively managing distress. Training should be provided to college corporation governing bodies on how to manage a duty of care for senior post holders. This could be by enhancing existing leadership development programmes.
3. Funded coaching programmes could be developed to provide private and safe external support networks for leaders.
4. Policymakers are encouraged to consider impact assessments in relation to wellbeing for staff working in colleges ahead of deployment.
5. The regulatory regime should be reviewed by senior officials and college representative bodies to ensure that unnecessary or unsustainable pressure is imposed through performance frameworks or the culture of their execution. 

Mental health: Dangerous ‘distress’

When concluding his report, Mr Rimmer said it was proof that distress is impacting on principals and that urgent intervention is needed to reduce, if not eradicate, harmful distress factors. 

He said: “Distress is a very real and dangerous consideration within the FE sector and affects all roles. From this research, it is proven that distress is currently impacting principals. There is insufficient consideration given to distress by individuals adopting self-care, the colleges as institutions ensuring that principals operate under a duty of care, from a legal and moral perspective, and the sector, through policy, is creating the conditions that allow, and in many cases, promote higher distress for leaders.

“Effective leadership cannot function properly if leaders are unwell or under unsustainable conditions. For some leaders, this is being currently viewed simply as a “cost” of the role and to some degree is offset by sense of purpose and civic duty associated with senior public service. However, the research from literature and this research demonstrates that the impact on short- and long-term wellbeing cannot be offset and is likely to hold danger and real costs from emotional, physical and psychological perspectives. This impacts on the culture and performance of colleges, which can only be detrimental when extrapolated to the sector as a whole.

“It is considered long overdue that urgent interventions must be sought to reduce, if not eradicate, harmful distress factors through care, support, dialogue and improved policy. The voices from the tightrope are getting stronger and clearer than ever on this issue...but, sadly, the tightrope is getting thinner and the fall more perilous.”