The mental health and wellbeing of those working in schools has been a focus this week, as heart-breaking figures regarding the amount of school staff who have seen colleagues cry since the beginning of the current academic year have been released.
According to the Teacher Tapp app, almost 75% of Head Teachers who responded to a survey said they had seen staff members in tears. While these figures paint a sad picture of the education sector at the moment, they hardly come as a revelation. The wellbeing of school staff has long been a focus of Schools North East’s lobbying work, having called on the Department for Education to introduce a series of measures to protect the physical and mental health of school staff, since the beginning of the 2020-21 academic year.
Data gathered by Schools North East in November 2020 – to which over 200 NE schools contributed – was sent in an open letter to former Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, expressing concern that the toll of the ongoing pandemic, coupled with uncertainty around summer exams, and the looming threat of Ofsted, was creating high levels of unnecessary pressure, stress and anxiety on all school staff.
Almost a year on and, as is highlighted by the results of the Teacher Tapp app, the same worries remain. Reports are coming in from across our region of school staff on their knees with fatigue leading to a rising fear of burn-out – a significant worry, with this occurring so early on in the academic year. Despite this fatigue, staff are still expected to deal with a complex range of covid and non-covid problems, including the mental health and wellbeing of students that have suffered greatly from the effects of the pandemic.
Urgent calls have been made from across the education sector for the Secretary of State to respond to this situation. The Association of School and College Leaders’ General Secretary, Geoff Barton, said that the government must deliver on ‘its promises to increase teacher pay and tackle workload’, echoing the call Schools North East made earlier this month at our annual Summit. Geoff Barton went on to say that the pressure under which schools will have worked throughout the pandemic will ‘undoubtedly have taken its toll on leaders, teachers and support staff’. Sinead Mc Brearty, the Chief Executive of Education Support, echoed this point, stating that ‘we must put appropriate support in place and address the drivers of stress in our schools.’
Highlighting this issue from a regional perspective, Schools North East held a roundtable with Trust CEOs this week and the overall consensus was that schools in the NE are all suffering from the same problem. Covid is still very much an issue and continues to have a worrying impact on both staff and student absences, causing some schools to request whole year groups to work from home, as well as increasing difficulties in accessing supply staff. Supply agencies being so stretched means that students are not gaining consistency in the delivery of their education and the workload pressures on staff are exacerbated further.
School Leaders continue to feel that they are in a mode of constant ‘fight or flight’ and ‘crisis management’, with CEOs stating that strong school leaders are ‘beginning to lose their usual resilience, with more looking to go part-time’. It needs to be recognised that, with all of the pressures of working in a school – as well as dealing with covid outbreaks, the threat of Ofsted, delivering the curriculum, and worrying attendance figures – there will be considerable collateral damage to staff in our schools if urgent action is not taken.
This raises another worrying factor in the latest figures from the survey – as if the figures weren’t sad enough – in that there may be some members of staff who would not have cried in the classroom, but in the car on the way home or, indeed, at home, away from colleagues. There are potentially many who may not have been seen at all, as well as some who will have noticed colleagues crying and may not be on the app (Teacher Tapp app), meaning the true figure could be heart-breakingly astronomical.
At Schools North East, the mental and physical health of those working in NE schools is of paramount importance. Our annual School Business Management Conference took place last week, with a whole host of sessions dedicated to wellbeing and how teachers, support staff, school business managers, senior leaders, Head Teachers and CEOs can adjust to better accommodate the pressures they face. However, the sad truth remains that, unless changes happen from on high and workloads are eased significantly, the number of school staff noticing colleagues in tears is going to significantly rise, followed closely by colleagues leaving the profession.
Schools North East has called on Nadhim Zahawi and the Department for Education to take effective action to reduce workloads for everyone in school. He needs to focus the Department for Education on ensuring that pointless bureaucracy is eliminated and enable our schools to focus on the teaching of the young people in their care.
