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PrimarySecondaryHealth & Wellbeing

‘Wellbeing’ for Teachers has to be More than a Meaningless Buzzword

When ‘wellbeing’ becomes just another item on the SLT’s to do list, how is it actually improving life for teachers, asks Andrea Taylor…

Andrea Taylor
by Andrea Taylor
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I’ve opted out of wellbeing.

Alarming, and possibly controversial? I’m working hard at being well in all corners of life.

I maintain a tight grip on my workload, juggling several areas of responsibility and a slightly looser grip on my responsibilities to my family.

I can just about see the floor in most of the rooms in my house and my children are feral for only part of the week. I don’t work at weekends and I don’t go to bed later than 11pm on weeknights.

Overall, I don’t think I’m doing too badly.

There are pinch points where work or ‘life’ takes a turn in the backseat, but that’s natural – and who wouldn’t feel more in control with a couple of hours extra in the week, or 10 more glue sticks?

To be clear, I haven’t opted out of being well, far from it.

I have opted out of ‘wellbeing’. I’ve opted out of waking up at 4am in a cold sweat because I’ve forgotten the gift for my ‘wellbeing buddy’ (and will probably therefore skip breakfast so I can pop in the supermarket on the way into school).

I’m opting out of the guilt of not attending the half termly staff social, due to a young family and the associated lack of money / energy / childcare (the list goes on).

I’m opting out of the after-school yoga session, because despite the postural implications of hunching over a desk, the drive to clear my marking before the weekend vastly outweighs my desire to ‘downward dog’.

High stakes

Both the good thing and the bad thing about wellbeing in schools is that it’s become high priority. To raise the stakes even further, the notion of ‘wellbeing’ is talked about in the same breath as critical issues such as teacher recruitment, retention and real-term budget cuts.

Wellbeing has become a ‘thing’ that schools should do. It’s become a point of action. Questions are being asked in offices up and down the country regarding ‘what we can do about staff wellbeing’.

The issue for me is not necessarily the question, but the (admittedly well-meaning) answers, which lose the most important element of being well – the individual.

Recently, I came across a model that I’ve found really compelling and revealing, as checking in with my own ideas about wellbeing at work.

The ‘Job Demands Resources (JDR) Model’ (as described by Rebecca Allen and Sam Sims in ‘Teacher Gap’, Routledge, 2018) provides a simple and useful framework that can be used to start really meaningful conversations around wellbeing with teachers and support staff in schools.

The JDR model (Demerouti et al, 2001) identifies two main factors that affect our commitment and motivation at work; demands and resources.

Demands are aspects of the job that could negatively impact on wellbeing, if they are too intense, nonsensical or too much of a hindrance on a teacher’s ability to carry out their role effectively (think triple marking, extensive lesson planning, multiple data drops).

They can negatively affect our sense of purpose, commitment and self-efficacy if left unchecked.

Real needs

Resources, meanwhile, are the things at our disposal that make the ‘demands’ bearable or increase our willingness or mental/emotional capacity to fulfil them (think social support, leisure time, adequate training, mentoring).

The beauty of this model is its simplicity. In my practice as a lead mentor, I have provided trainee teachers with a template (a set of scales) on which they have indicated those things that they identify as demands and the things that keep them ticking along.

The results have been interesting and have shown just how individual the pursuit of wellbeing really is.

I’m not knocking the coffee mornings, the yoga or the staff socials, if they provide the resources that allow people to feel motivated and committed.

I applaud the efforts to highlight social, emotional and physical health.

However, such strategies can have unintended consequences and so I advise teachers to identify for themselves the extent to which they have the resources necessary to feel motivated and effective in the classroom, and I would urge school leaders to use this as the start of the conversation around true wellbeing.


Andrea Taylor is director of a West Midlands Teaching School and professional mentor in ITE.

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