Teacher wellbeing is rightly receiving a lot of focus at the moment. I have written about it here on Tes over the past few months while it is being widely discussed within leadership teams and at conferences. However, when it comes to taking responsibility for wellbeing, there is a balance schools need to try and achieve.

There is a growing trend in society for employees to see staff wellbeing as the responsibility of the organisation. Many think the answer to the wellbeing problem is in the hands of the management, who need to step up and provide more wellbeing initiatives.

At one school at which I worked, the staff consultative group compiled a list of requests as to how we could improve staff wellbeing. The list consisted of things like fruit at breaktime, lunchtime yoga, and cake to celebrate positive inspection results.

While these sorts of wellbeing initiatives have their place, it has quickly become clear to me that staff wellbeing is about more than yoghurt and yoga. It is about creating a working culture that is supportive, open, safe, and where there is a sense of belonging. Creating a culture like this needs buy-in from the bottom up. So where do the responsibilities for staff wellbeing lie?

School’s responsibility

Managing Resources

School leaders have a particular responsibility to allocate the (sometimes limited) resources at their disposal in a way that protects and enhances staff well-being.

Timetables, lesson allocations and workload: As every teacher knows, the amount of contact time that teachers have and when their PPA time falls are very important factors in determining the pressure points within a week. No one wants a day without some PPA time, or to teach Year 9 on a Friday afternoon. Furthermore, class size is an important factor; not only in terms of classroom management but also the amount of time that it takes to do the marking or to write a set of reports.

Reporting cycles: Feeding back to parents, whether in the form of a parent-teacher meeting or in written reports, is time consuming. School leaders have a significant responsibility to ensure that these meetings and deadlines are all spaced out evenly to avoid unnecessary stress at key points during the school year.

Support: The level of administrative, technician and TA support that it provides also is a factor. As every primary school teacher knows, a strong teaching assistant is invaluable both in improving the effectiveness of a class and in making the overall workload bearable.

All of these factors have the potential to enhance staff wellbeing when done well, and to harm it if done badly.

Creating a Culture

Every workplace has its own culture that evolves independently of the formal channels of the organization. Senior leaders have a responsibility to do what they can to shape that culture, but they can only be part of the solution.

Core Hours: Defining core hours is a way in which schools can counter the always-on culture. Core hours are those hours when staff are expected to be on site. They should not be equated with working hours. Core hours give permission for staff to go home and to manage their time outside school in their own way. It is the nature of education that there will always be preparation and marking to do at home during term time.

It is desirable that as many meetings as possible are timetabled within these times. However, it is inevitable that some meetings will fall outside this time in order to get key personnel together. This is often the case in complex organisations where it is necessary to liaise between sites and between the primary and senior sections of the school.

Modelling wellbeing: leaders have a responsibility to lead by example recognizing that their actions speak louder than words.

Individual’s responsibility

Individuals need to work within a culture that fosters positive wellbeing, but they also need to take a level of responsibility for their own mental health.

Doing the basics: In this wellbeing mix, teachers need to be responsible for the basics of diet, exercise, and sleep, which may mean getting an early night when required. I had little sympathy for the young teachers in Dubai who complained about their term-time exhaustion when they were partying hard on the brunch and clubbing circuits all weekend!

Keeping work in perspective: It is all too easy to blame the school for being the source of stress in one’s life, but there is often more to it than just work. In practice, teachers’ lives are often complex. Home and family life routinely throw up their own challenges: financial worries, children, bereavement, marital breakup, and the stresses and strains of distance from one’s family all can be factors that impact an individual’s wellbeing.

Getting support: Thankfully, talking about problems that we face in life is not so much of a taboo as it was 10 years ago. It is far more common for people to have professional support in the form of coaching or counselling. Ultimately, it is for the individual to find the support that he or she needs; and it is often best that this is away from the workplace. Having said that, at Kellett, we provide short-term counselling support to staff who are facing personal challenges and then encourage them to find an external provider if there is a long-term need.

Striking a balance: ‘We have a lot to fit into 180 days’

There is a danger in the debate about workplace wellbeing that education feels bound to follow every initiative and example of best practice from business and industry. This would be wrong.

Education has a very different rhythm to other professions: it is rare that we go more than six weeks without having a scheduled holiday. This is far different from the relentlessness of office life, working in other careers with 25 days’ annual leave.

Our approach to work-life balance needs to reflect this reality. Term time can be very busy: we have a lot to fit into 180 days. Lesson preparation and marking, after-school activities, parent-teacher meetings and school productions do all go with the territory; but we always know that there is a hard-earned and much-needed break just around the corner.

Mark S Steed is the principal and CEO of Kellett School, the British School in Hong Kong; and previously ran schools in Devon, Hertfordshire and Dubai. He tweets @independenthead