The proportion of senior leadership team members experiencing consistent feelings of “burnout” has more than doubled over the past five years, research shows.
Some 31 per cent of school SLT, excluding headteachers, reported feeling this way in a Teacher Tapp poll this month - up from 12 per cent in October 2018.
The proportion of classroom teachers experiencing burnout has risen from 16 per cent to 28 per cent during this time.
Levels of burnout among headteachers have remained relatively high over the same period, currently standing at 37 per cent - the same as at the height of the first Covid lockdown in 2020.
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the union was concerned that headteachers and senior leaders are being “broken by the severity of the pressures they are facing”.
And Mr Barton said that the high levels of workload, alongside a “punitive accountability regime” and shortages of funding and staff, “are making the job impossible and unsustainable”.
“School and college leaders go beyond the call of duty on a daily basis, and, frankly, it is something that is taken for granted by a government that is complacent about their welfare,” he said.
More school leaders suffering burnout
A Teacher Tapp blog on the survey findings describes burnout as ”a state of physical and emotional exhaustion” that “can occur when you experience long-term stress; for example, working a stressful job”.
Common signs of burnout, it says, include “feeling tired or drained most of the time, feeling helpless, trapped and/or defeated”.
Survey respondents were asked to what extent they were suffering from burnout.
Those who said they were experiencing symptoms that would not go away, or said that they were completely burned out and often wondered if they could go on with the job, were classified as being “consistently burned out” by Teacher Tapp.
The survey results also suggest that the first Covid lockdown affected teachers and heads differently.
The proportion of headteachers reporting burnout rose steeply from 19 per cent in October 2018 to 37 per cent in April 2020, a month after the first national Covid-19 lockdown.
However, the figure among classroom teachers fell from 16 per cent to 12 per cent over the same time period, before jumping to 20 per cent in October 2020, soon after all pupils returned to school.
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said that the “depressing findings about high levels of burnout come as no surprise”.
“For too long the government has taken the goodwill of hardworking leaders and school staff for granted, serving up massive real-terms funding and pay cuts alongside a punishing high-stakes accountability and inspection regime,” he said.
The government had pledged to tackle the impact of workload and inspection on school leaders as part of its teacher pay offer earlier this year, he said, adding that “tangible proposals” on this were vital.
Niamh Sweeney, deputy general secretary of the NEU, called the latest survey findings “alarming”.
“We need a serious effort from the government to reduce the work intensity of teachers and leaders. Too many are burning out,” she said.
A Department for Education spokesperson said that the government was “taking action to reduce the pressures” on school staff “where we can”.
