Teachers suffered heightened anxiety and plummeting happiness levels after the onset of the Covid crisis, new research shows.

And the profession also experienced “low points” in life satisfaction in spring and autumn last year, according to a report published today by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER).

Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study and the Annual Population Survey, the NFER measured trends in teachers’ welfare throughout 2020.

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“The onset of the pandemic led to an increase in subjective distress, a rise in anxiety, and lower levels of happiness and life satisfaction among teachers, compared to pre-pandemic levels,” the report states.

The researchers found that teachers’ wellbeing declined after the start of the first lockdown and then “improved somewhat during summer 2020”.

“Wellbeing also deteriorated again in the autumn 2020, coinciding with the second wave of Covid-19 infections,” the report adds.

Meanwhile, teachers’ distress levels “rose considerably” during the autumn term, the researchers found.

The report states: “As cases of Covid-19 in the community rose in autumn 2020, teachers may have perceived working in school as increasingly risky for the health of themselves and their close contacts, whereas they had mostly worked from home during the spring and summer.”

Teachers’ anxiety levels also “rose during lockdown”, the research shows.

“When asked ‘overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?’ teachers...scored their anxiety level as being, on average, around three before the pandemic. In March, this rose to more than four...before falling steadily through the spring,” the report states.

Anxiety then began to “rise again in the late summer and autumn, as Covid-19 case numbers began to rise and some restrictions were reimposed in response”, it adds.

In addition, the researchers found that teachers had “lower average life satisfaction during 2020 compared to pre-pandemic levels”.

“The data shows that [teachers] experienced low points in life satisfaction in spring 2020 and again in the autumn, with slightly higher levels in the summer,” the report states.

Teachers’ happiness levels followed a similar pattern - falling during the first lockdown “relative to their pre-pandemic average”, and then steadily recovering over the summer, the researchers found.

Happiness among teachers then fell again after the summer holidays, the report states.

The Department for Education has been approached for comment.