For decades, Education Support has been proud to stand alongside the education workforce in moments of real need.

Our grants programme has been a tangible expression of that support: direct financial help, delivered quickly, often at moments when people had nowhere else to turn.

For almost 150 years, these grants were a way of channelling support to colleagues in distress, funded by working and retired teachers.

It is with huge sadness that we have closed our grants service, which stopped accepting new applications on 1 February. With limited resources and declining donations, we have chosen to focus our efforts on wellbeing and mental health support for the sector.

This is not an easy decision and it has weighed heavily on our team and trustees. We know it will be disappointing to many who have sought support from the service or valued the reassurance it provided.

But it is a decision taken carefully and in the interest of sustaining long-term emotional and mental health support for people working in education.

Protecting teachers’ mental health

Mental health and wellbeing support has never been more urgently needed.

We are in the middle of a teacher retention crisis that continues to destabilise schools and colleges. When educators are overwhelmed or burnt out, it affects not only their own wellbeing but also the life chances of the children and young people they teach.

Protecting the mental health of the workforce is a fundamental pillar of delivering high-quality education.

This is where we believe we can make the biggest impact in the long term because our unique expertise lies in workplace wellbeing, mental and emotional health support, and positively navigating the dilemmas and trade-offs of working in education today.

Against this backdrop, we have made careful choices about how to protect our services that are most widely accessible, and least present elsewhere in the system.

Our free helpline, staffed by qualified counsellors who understand the pressures of education, is one of a kind; it supports around 4,500 staff each year. Around 10 per cent of all callers are in significant distress, clinically assessed to be at risk of suicide.

Decline in donors

Our research and campaigning work remain essential to addressing the systemic causes of poor mental health across the sector: going beyond a short-term fix for those in immediate distress.

We are proud to have led the charge on increasing the use of professional supervision in education settings.

Together, these services remain central to how we support the wellbeing of educators and help them to make their careers more sustainable, so they can change the lives of children and young people for the better.

Over the past decade, Education Support has experienced a long, steady decline in the number of donors supporting our work.

Our remaining donors have been extraordinary in their loyalty and generosity, but this group is ageing and shrinking.

Focusing on core support

As demand for our services increases, our income simply will not allow us to do everything.

Closing the grants programme allows us to focus our resources on the services that make the greatest impact for the profession overall, and, in turn, improve outcomes for children and young people.

What will not change is our commitment to standing alongside the education workforce. But our services can only continue with support from across the sector.

If you value our work (if you have used it or know someone who has) we are asking you to consider supporting us. A regular gift, of any amount, is the most effective way to protect and sustain mental health services for educators long into the future.

Closing the grants programme is painful. But the mission that drove it - the belief that educators deserve to be supported in this extraordinary profession - remains at the heart of everything we do. And with the sector’s help, it always will.

Sinéad Mc Brearty is CEO of the Education Support Partnership

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