Teachers are suffering “fatigue” from a “hyper-accountability industry” which is putting them “psychologically at risk”, a wellbeing expert has warned.

Tim O’Brien, visiting fellow in psychology and human development at University College London’s Institute of Education, said the accountability system had left some teachers in a “state of manic vigilance”.

Dr O’Brien - who has carried out research in the area of teacher wellbeing - was speaking at the Chartered College of Teaching’s annual conference on Saturday.

“There are some people I’m meeting in the profession who are experiencing what I’m referring to as ‘hyper accountability fatigue’”, he told the conference.

“There’s just a hyper-accountability industry in teaching that is making people psychologically at risk; fear, guilt, ‘good is never good enough’ - these sorts of issues are placing teachers into a state of manic vigilance.”

Dr O’Brien described the “emotional labour of teachers” as “intense and underestimated”, and said the profession had experienced “enforced change without consultation for decades” which left people feeling “de-professionalised and not trusted”.

This view was echoed by Nikki Able, deputy headteacher at Uffcolme School in Devon, who was speaking on the same panel as Dr O’Brien.

Ms Able decided to conduct a focus group with the middle leaders in her school, because she’d “picked up in middle leadership meetings that they weren’t okay”.

She found that while middle leaders in English and maths “felt in a really good place”, other heads of department were “struggling”.

“It wasn’t about school as such, it was about systemic change,” she said. “It was curriculum change, it was about assessment change, it was about new subject knowledge.

“And it was also about things linked to budget cuts. So when the school had to cut a member of staff, then you were having to manage supply or you were then having to manage non-specialists, all of that took a toll on the middle leader.”

Ms Able said her colleagues talked about “feeling guilty all the time - that they couldn’t give the time they wanted to teaching and to children because of the amount of their job which was involved in other areas”.

“They talked about insecurity. ‘Am I good enough? Am I doing okay? I don’t know if I’m doing okay’.

“They also talked about availability - parents emailing them late at night, other members of staff emailing them all the time, feeling like they needed to be 24/7 available.

“And they talked about feeling ‘done to’ - they were on the receipt of change but never able to drive it or influence it.”

As a result of the feedback, Ms Able said the school had carried out a workforce audit, recruited into departments which had been hit hardest by cuts and made “an effort to give positive feedback”. 

She added: “We’re looking at the email thing, whether we need to shut it down at certain times of the day. We still haven’t decided yet.”