Teaching is bad for your health. That’s the overwhelming message from a Tes survey of more than 4,000 teachers, conducted last month. The job negatively affects your fitness, your ability to maintain a healthy diet and your wellbeing, respondents told us. The chief reasons? Workload. Lack of time. And tiredness.

It would be tempting to simply lay these issues at the doors of schools and the government, and tell them to fix it. After all, teachers can only do as much as the restrictions on their time allow - and those restrictions are largely imposed upon them by those in charge.

The government would argue that it is in the process of creating a solution in the form of the Reducing teacher workload action plan, a response to last year’s survey of teachers on the challenges they face. The document offers an extensive list of things that it is doing or that schools could do to tackle workload (see bit.ly/LessWorkload). As the plan was only released in February, we will have to wait and see if the steps it sets out will be effective.

The government has also released a poster for schools listing dos and don’ts for reducing workload, which comes free with today’s Tes magazine.

Schools having an impact

As for schools, despite our survey suggesting that only 18 per cent of teachers worked at a school tackling the issue, some are attempting to have an impact.

But how much can be done at an individual level, by teachers themselves? We decided to try to find out.

In the following pages, we have interviewed experts in healthy eating, fitness and wellbeing to discover whether it is possible for teachers to make positive changes in their lives to counteract the pressures of the job.

The good news is that they can. The even better news is that the three experts have provided tips, techniques and advice to prove it.

We have also chatted with the teacher behind the social media phenomenon #teacher5aday, which has got teachers doing it for themselves.

So welcome to the Tes reboot issue. Our survey identified the problems, let’s see if we can begin to offer part of the solution.