Roy Bland explains what it is that makes teachers suffer from feelings of guilt when they have to take time off sick. I always feel guilty when I’m ill and away from school.” This remark, made to me recently by a teacher who is in fact rarely absent, is one that most teachers will recognise as true of their own feelings on those mornings when they ring in to report that they won’t be in school that day.
There are some obvious reasons why it should be so. There is the knowledge that your pupils will have their education disrupted. However good the colleague or supply teacher covering your lessons, it just isn’t the same as you being there.
Then there is the equally worrying realisation that your hard-pressed colleagues may lose their valuable “free” periods to cover your lessons. And, sympathetic and understanding as they are, you know just how you feel (probably resentful) on those mornings when you see your own name up there on the cover list.
So along with your illness you may have to cope with the accompanying feelings of guilt - and over recent years the pressures on teachers have increased enormously, resulting in more stress-related illness.
In 1990, 4,133 teachers retired due to bad health, an increase of 50 per cent since 1985. Also in 1990, 12,345 teachers took early retirement at the age of 55, and it is highly likely that these figures have increased again in the past three years.
This has led insurance companies to uprate the risk factor in teaching. Teachers used to be bracketed with other professional groups, such as architects and doctors, in the lower risk category. We are now grouped with plasterers, chimney sweeps and light industrial workers in a higher risk band.
It cannot be right that workers should feel bad about being unfit for work. (It is, in fact, a sign of how conscientious they are.) In the Netherlands, workers are allowed each year to take two “baal dagen” - roughly, “fed-up days” - on those days when there may be nothing medically wrong, but when for other reasons they feel unable to cope at work. It might not be much, but it does reveal a more honest, sensible and realistic approach to the stresses of modern life. In this country, many ‘flu days are of course really baal dagen - but we dare not say so.
We may thus add to our problems the stress that goes with the guilt of dissembling. Dutch workers also have one long weekend every month. The headmaster of a school I visited was allowed the last Friday of every month off school and his staff were given other days. Secure part-time work is another sensible Dutch practice.
Schools here appear to have done little to help staff cope with increased work-load and pressure. There are approaches that, while not antidotes to work overloads, can certainly help. Training days can be used “creatively” to help cope with new demands; time-management systems and advice are worth trying. When a teacher returns to school after an absence, a concerned enquiry from the headteacher always helps. An open, trusting and sympathetic response from senior management is what matters most.
A now-retired colleague of mine did not take a single day off school in his near 40 years of service - a quite remarkable record. But most of us are not so lucky - or so hardy!
On those rare days when we do need to phone in sick, we should do so without feeling that we are doing something wrong - and so worry ourselves sick about that, too.
Roy Bland teaches mathematics in Cornwall.
