Approximately 15,000 teachers leave the UK every year in pursuit of a new career in education overseas. The National Education Union also estimated in April 2019 that at least one fifth of teachers planned to leave the profession within two years. Why? Workload and stress are the most quoted reasons. But workload and stress have many other layers.
I came to state education teaching at a young age – 24, working in Further Education (FE). My previous experience had been in the private sector with children of school age. Naively, I believed working in FE would be similar: in my mind, the students had chosen to be there rather than in compulsory education. I had secured a position in an inner-city college in London and quickly learned that my initial expectations were grossly inaccurate. There was a whole new language to learn – literally. Street slang – which had changed since I was at school. And then there was the challenge of behaviour, economics, varying educational levels and suitability to a performing arts course (often viewed as the easy option – especially to ‘meet girls’). Furthermore, there were the social worker/big sister issues.
As the only ‘young’ member of the team (everyone else on the team was at least 12 years older than I), students felt they could open up and trust me, for which I am always so grateful. However, although there were similarities in our lives, there were also gaping holes. The pull of their glamourous life was about, crime, violence and sexual exploitation. One girl ran crying from my class one day. It transpired she had been violently raped two nights ago at a party where her classmates were also at. Another was forced to watch as her uncle raped her younger sister the night before. One male desperately wanted out of gang life and out of London but was on tag and had gang members waiting to escort him to god knows where, when he finished college daily. Another lived on his own and was being made to sell drugs or the ‘boss’ would kill his mother. The list goes on and on. This is what these young people – teenagers no less – had to deal with daily!
There are procedures and policies for these types of issues (which later became known as safeguarding) as well as adults to whom teachers can refer these students for the professional help they so desperately need. I often went to the staffroom or home and cried for my students. I spent evenings and weekends worried about them and I remember the relief I would feel seeing them come into class. And I remember the dread I felt if they didn’t. Calling them or their parents to find out what had happened to them – why were they not in college today? I desperately wanted to get them out of their situation, even if it was only my sofa that I could offer them. But that is against the rules, and I completely understand and agree with why it is. As a teacher, no one teaches you how to respond or deal with these situations. It’s not covered by the PGCE, PTTLS or DTTLs courses. Help and support from management and seniors? Management told me to counsel a woman in her forties, meeting with her once a week to allow her to talk to/at me – so she had someone to rant to, so that she was able to focus in her classes. This was in my first year of teaching (and training!). I had a mentor, who was brilliant and supportive. Had it not been for him, I would not have survived my first three years as a teacher. But still, it wasn’t enough. I needed professional help to deal with the secondary trauma of what my students were going through. I would often find myself waking in the night or not sleeping at all. If sleep did come it was usually interrupted by nightmares and worry for my students. As much as we have support in place for students – and rightly so – who do teachers have? How do we support teachers who experience secondary trauma? We have courses and support for senior leaders who experience, what is viewed as, expected high-stress levels. But one could argue that this is also experienced by teaching and support staff daily, yet no support is provided for them.
The challenges are clear when one tallies up the daily stresses of a teaching position with all the extra duties and responsibilities placed upon them, usually aggressive pressures from the government, conflicts at work between colleagues or management, and the additional layer of a complex personal life, where can our teachers go for help? It has taken a global pandemic to put the minimum (in some institutions) support in place for teachers.
We usually don’t see the decline until it’s too late and the teacher is burnt out or snaps. However, early intervention could help and save valuable, experienced teachers from leaving us. Where can we go for this? How do we know what to look for? Most courses currently available are good at introducing mental illness whilst taking the stigma away or touch on how to support the teacher once they have reached ‘that’ point. But what if we could intervene before the person reaches this crisis point? Could we retain our teachers and support them whilst also reducing the added stress faced by management and senior leaders, when this happens?
This is exactly why my Masters thesis was a study into Mental Health and Well-Being for teachers. Elsa Schneider (1950) looked at ‘A Healthy Teacher’. Schneider found the teacher’s health was paramount as healthy teachers are able to meet the challenges faced as part of the role. Schneider goes on to suggest that teaching is not an easy role, but when the teacher is unwell, it can become increasingly harder to perform the role.
According to Miller and Wiltse (1979), the MHWB of a teacher is vital and plays a pivotal role as it will affect the atmosphere in the classroom and the students around them. It is important to note there is a difference between a mental health problem and an emotional problem, where symptoms of a mental health problem may be displayed but only for a limited time until the emotional issue has reached a resolution, (Miller and Wiltse, 1979). Miller and Wiltse (1979), recognise that it is not always easy to identify emotional problems with teachers. However, if the teaching and learning environment is to be positive and productive, then the institution’s administrators, management and teaching staff need to be able to self-analyse and play a role in supporting a teacher experiencing mental health issues or emotional well-being problems.
Succedo Quality Education (SQE) have created an interactive and comprehensive course, The Healthy Educator, designed to support those in education, before it’s too late and we continue to lose our hardworking teachers with their years of priceless experience.
