Every year, Oxford University Press analyses our changing language to identify a word of cultural significance. The word selected for 2025 is “rage bait” - online content designed to elicit anger or outrage.
Sometimes, over the past few months, it has felt as though this is what the Department for Education has been doing to the education workforce.
A series of policy announcements has landed badly among leaders and teachers who increasingly feel exasperated by the sense of being asked to meet more expectations with fewer resources.
For example:
There is nothing wrong with the intentions behind many of these policies. Who would not want to see more enrichment options, improved attendance, higher standards of literacy and excellent guidance for school leavers?
Indeed, schools and trusts already work tirelessly to deliver all these things and many more. The frustration they feel when they see the government announcing new initiatives enforced by Ofsted is the gap between the fine words of policymakers and the lack of resources to support those objectives.
It is easy to set a target. The bigger question is how to get there.
Squeezed from all angles
If these policies were landing in a sector that is well-funded and staffed, it would be a different matter. But that is not the case.
The DfE, in its evidence to the School Teachers’ Review Body, recognised that existing government funding will not be enough to deliver the cost of future pay awards and expects schools to realise “better value from existing spend” to make up the shortfall.
However, this is in the context of a financial situation that is already very challenging, with many schools running in-year deficits while making cuts to staffing, their curriculum offer and increasing class sizes.
The only possible outcome of being asked to make more efficiency savings is to deepen these cuts.
At the same time, Ofsted has launched its new inspection framework, which applies five grading points across multiple evaluation areas. Feedback to its own independent wellbeing impact assessment described this as representing “many more ways to fail”.
All this is done in the name of “raising standards”. But is that really likely to happen if the education workforce is demoralised and burned out?
And the evidence that leaders and teachers are at the end of their tether is deeply worrying.
In its annual Teacher Wellbeing Index, charity Education Support found that “the wellbeing of our education workforce is at crisis point” and “the pressures educators face are unrelenting, and the consequences should alarm anyone who cares about education”.
Perhaps most shockingly of all, it found that 36 per cent of the workforce are at risk of probable clinical depression.
A policymaking plea
So, as we enter the Christmas holidays and look forward to a year ahead where we will see the announcement of many more policies - particularly over the special educational needs and disabilities system - the plea that I make to policymakers is simple.
They must do more to value and take care of the education workforce.
Leaders and teachers are keen to work with the government to deliver the best possible outcomes they can for children and young people. It is the reason that they chose to become educators. And they are ultimately the vital resource upon which all education policies rely for their success.
It is neither sensible nor responsible to heap more and more pressure on the workforce, and it is only likely to result in further damage to teacher recruitment and retention.
We simply cannot tolerate a situation in which more than a third of the workforce is on the brink of clinical depression. We need educators to feel happy and motivated in their jobs, not as though they are desperately clinging on.
Let’s not have yet more targets, yet more Ofsted, yet more of doing more with less. Let’s instead put the welfare of the education workforce at the front and centre of policymaking - recognising that it is people who are the foundation of a great education system.
Let’s decide that in 2026, the word of the year in the world of education will be “wellbeing”.
Pepe Di’Iasio is general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders
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