HR and Staff Wellbeing

Workload and Wellbeing: It’s More Complex Than You Think

Teaching is becoming one of the highest stress professions and burnout is rampant. What can be done to help mitigate its effects? Ben White explains why it’s proving harder than everyone thought.

Teaching is exhausting. More exhausting, according to the 2017 Skills and Employability Survey (SES), and more likely to be classed as ‘high strain’ than any other profession. Nursing, in case you’re wondering, came second. Nearly nine out of ten teachers report being regularly exhausted at the end of each day.

For reference, just over 7 of every 10 nurses said the same. Teachers probably didn’t need the SES to point out our workload problem. We already knew. Or at least 43,000 of us did. The DfE’s 2014 workload challenge consultation was their most popular to date. This, ironically, created a workload problem for the DfE. They resolved it by sampling the responses—analysing 10% of them. As a result of this survey, several things have happened: ministers and the DfE have moved to tackle teacher workload, there has been increased interest from Ofsted and a range of voices across the digital edusphere, and workload is something we are discussing more. However, I don’t think that many of the voices in this debate are engaging as deeply as they could with the relationship between how workload is perceived by employees and their well-being.

Workload is often assumed to mean ‘the amount of work which an employee is required to complete’. Workload analysis informed by this common-sense definition tends to focus upon the efficiency of work processes. How much time does the work take to complete? This framing of the issue inevitably leads to advice about how schools can do the things they currently do more efficiently.

Well-being analysis in schools tends to start from the assumption that teaching is a career with inherent stresses and strains that can impact negatively upon well-being. This approach tends therefore to lead to advice about how to support people whose well-being is negatively affected by their job. The recently announced teacher wellbeing working group, for example, was launched with a video ad stating that ‘Teaching is a hugely rewarding career. But it can also be challenging and stressful’.

I would not say that either of the two approaches are inherently wrong. Both shed some useful light on the issues of workload and well-being, respectively. However, it is their monopoly position in each domain which I would like to challenge.

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