How can school leaders support teachers’ mental health and wellbeing?

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How can school leaders support teachers’ mental health and wellbeing?

Tes Marketing

In this blog, we explore how workload and work-life balance can influence teachers’ mental health and the role leaders play in supporting them.

Teachers take on lots of additional roles at school – administration, planning, safeguarding, and supporting students’ wellbeing. While this is often rewarding, it can take a toll on a teacher’s mental health. As a school leader, it’s key that you understand the wellbeing challenges teachers face and how you can support them.

Teacher wellbeing matters

Teachers play an essential role in students’ lives. Alongside supporting their learning, they help keep students safe and can be the first to notice when a child is struggling with their mental health.

Having strong wellbeing makes us all more resilient and better able to manage the various demands of our job. As such, a teacher with better mental health and wellbeing is more able to support students and contribute to a supportive and positive school culture.

While wellbeing does benefit work performance, it is important regardless in helping your staff lead happier and healthier lives. Stronger wellbeing also often makes it easier for them to build a healthy work-life balance, so they enjoy time away from work and properly recharge at home. In turn, this makes them more resilient to deal with work-related stress, creating a cycle of generally better mental health.

Managing workload and work-life balance

A heavy workload has a big impact on teachers’ wellbeing – it’s easy to feel overwhelmed when there’s always too much to do. Managing a teacher's workload may be difficult at times, so it’s important to find a way that works for you.

You can start a conversation about workload and wellbeing challenges with staff, so they feel able to talk about it and support each other. Peer support between staff members might look like sharing workload, giving each other wellbeing advice, or just providing space for others to talk about how they're feeling.

Whatever peer support looks like, leaders can play a big role in kickstarting it by opening a dialogue about wellbeing, workload and work-life balance.

How can school leaders support teachers' wellbeing?

As well as improving work performance, staff wellbeing is key to creating a positive culture at school. Your staff should feel that their wellbeing and job satisfaction matter; as such, you have an important role to play in promoting wellbeing. There are many ways you can do this, but it is key that wellbeing is ingrained as a priority in your school's culture.

Carry out teacher wellbeing surveys

To address wellbeing challenges, you need to know what they are. Wellbeing surveys help you understand and address challenges your school is facing, and repeating surveys enables you to measure changes over time. Anonymous surveys are more useful in encouraging honesty, and it is important staff know they are free to express their opinions without fear of repercussions.

Showing staff that their opinions are valued is a big step in creating an open and supportive culture. Similarly, surveys enable you to identify strengths as well as areas for improvement, which can also benefit your culture in allowing you to celebrate where your setting is doing well.

Develop a teacher wellbeing policy

Once you are aware of your setting’s strengths and weaknesses, creating a wellbeing policy or action plan helps you to practically plan and implement changes. This demonstrates a commitment to supporting your teachers and staff, which goes a long way in making them feel valued and that their wellbeing matters.

You can use surveys to identify the areas your policy or plan needs to address and then use this to set targets you can measure with results from future surveys. It's useful for these to be specific and measurable – the SMART target framework may be useful to follow here.

Retention is as key as recruitment

We know that happy and supported teachers will not only do a better job, but also that a strong, supportive culture helps you retain your best teachers. That’s why our Staff Management platform incudes tools for retention as well as recruitment.

For one annual subscription price, the platform includes:

Anonymous staff wellbeing surveys, including a bank of questions developed by a psychologist and the option to add your own

Online CPD courses and unlimited safeguarding training

Support to recruit the best talent, with access to over 550,000 teachers, education professionals and support staff across the UK.

Support your staff with Tes Staff Management

Staff Management gives you the tools to support staff wellbeing and professional development, creating the supportive and positive culture that helps you retain your best teachers.

Learn more