How teacher wellbeing affects your students’ outcomes
What is wellbeing?
In this blog, we are using the term ‘wellbeing’ to refer to mental wellbeing. This means how you are feeling and how equipped you feel to manage and cope with the challenges of everyday life.
Employee wellbeing refers to how staff feel at work – this is influenced by a range of factors, including:
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Job demands and workload
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Support from peers and managers
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Leadership
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Workplace culture
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Personal factors (e.g. experiencing a bereavement or financial issues)
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Adjusting to life in a new place (such as if a teacher is working outside their home country)
As a school leader, your teachers’ mental health and wellbeing is important in its own right – and it also has a big impact on students.
How does teacher wellbeing impact student outcomes?
Teachers have the potential to massively impact their students’ lives. Better teacher wellbeing equips teachers to be the best they can be, so you can ensure they can have a strong, positive impact on students at your school.
Retention
Teacher retention has a big impact on student success. Having several different teachers for one class increases the chance of missing out or repeating certain content. As such, retaining teachers at your school gives students a more consistent experience, establishing a routine and helping them learn more effectively – which means better academic outcomes.
Supporting your teachers’ wellbeing and professional development is key to staff retention – teachers who feel their wellbeing and growth is not a priority often don’t feel valued at work, which gives them little reason to remain at a school.
Increased resilience
Teachers with stronger mental health and wellbeing are more resilient to manage the demands of their job.
This means being able to cope with challenges and better manage work-related stress, in turn helping them perform better and provide higher quality teaching. Higher quality and more effective teaching inevitably improves students’ academic performance, leading to better outcomes.
Positive relationships
Being better able to manage stress at work also gives teachers more mental capacity to support students, building stronger and more positive relationships. Positive relationships with students can improve behaviour in class, which in itself leads to better outcomes.
Stronger wellbeing also makes teachers more able to support students facing mental health and wellbeing challenges – and better mental health is linked to improved academic performance. Similarly, more mental capacity enables teachers to provide more academic support to students, further improving outcomes.
Increased motivation
If teachers feel their wellbeing matters at work, they feel valued. Feeling valued at work increases job satisfaction and helps you build better working relationships with your teachers.
This increases teachers’ motivation at work and the desire to do a good job, which results in higher quality, more effective teaching, as well as more support for students – ultimately improving outcomes at your school.
How can school leaders promote better wellbeing?
As a school leader, you play a big role in promoting a supportive culture and prioritising wellbeing in your setting. You can support your teachers’ and support staff’s wellbeing in a number of ways, such as with wellbeing surveys or by implementing a staff wellbeing policy.
Tes Teacher Wellbeing Report 2026
New insights into the pressures shaping teacher wellbeing in UK schools
Based on responses from thousands of school staff around the world, the Teacher Wellbeing Report 2026 reveals what leaders need to understand about workload, SEND pressure, inclusion, support capacity and long-term retention.