The mental health crisis crushing British teachers

Ellie Harrison, The Independent

Kate (name changed) loves teaching. She loves going to her primary school every day, standing up in front of her class, watching the children learn. It’s the job she’s always dreamed about having. Despite all this, she says that choosing the career is one of her biggest regrets. The prospect of work has started giving her panic attacks. She has so much paperwork to do that, outside of school, she’s hardly left the house for weeks. And now she’s desperate to quit. Where did it all go wrong?

“Being in the class is absolutely perfect,” she says. “But it’s everything else that takes over teaching, everything else on top of it, that’s made me hate it.” Whether it’s the mountain of admin on her desk, the torrent of emails, or all the meetings and worries for children’s care, it’s become too much. Kate is not alone. Teaching has always been one of the most rewarding professions, but it’s also one of the toughest. And it’s getting worse. A November study by the mental health charity Education Support found that teacher wellbeing is at a five-year low, with stress, insomnia and burnout all rising. In 2017, 67 per cent of schoolteachers were reporting feelings of stress — by 2023, that figure had risen starkly to 78 per cent.

The figures get worse everywhere you turn. This year, a workforce survey of members of the NASUWT union found that some teachers had been driven to the point of suicide by the stress of the job. Among 12,000 teachers, 23 per cent reported drinking more alcohol, 12 per cent the use of or increased use of antidepressants, and 3 per cent said they had self-harmed as a result of their work. These findings prompted members to back a suicide prevention strategy for teachers at the union’s annual conference in March.

And teachers are — unsurprisingly — leaving the profession in record numbers, too. The latest workforce survey by the Department for Education found that 40,000 teachers resigned from state schools in 2021/22 — almost 9 per cent of the teaching workforce, and the highest number since it began publishing the data in 2011. If they’re not actually quitting, lots of them are considering it. There is a Facebook group called “Life After Teaching — Exit the Classroom and Thrive”, which currently has 159,000 members and is filled with despairing posts.

Sinéad Mc Brearty, the head of Education Support, is not surprised. Mc Brearty has seen schoolteachers in floods of tears over not being able to budget for the school’s heating bill after energy prices soared following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She’s also spoken to numerous suicidal teachers and more than one who has admitted to fantasising about purposely crashing their car on the way to work, so they wouldn’t have to go in. “There are a lot of people who really are just broken by this career,” she says. “And it’s such a terribly sad thing. Because they go into this job with such a clear sense of purpose, and they really are wanting to make the world a better place. They’re full of vim and vigour, and they’re broken by the experience of working in schools and the demand that’s there. It’s a tragedy, really, that we can’t get that right.”

Last year’s teacher strikes were the biggest in a decade — and were eventually called off after members of four education unions voted to accept the government’s 6.5 per cent pay rise offer. It was a huge misconception, though, that the strikes were just about money. Yes, teacher pay is low for the work they do (salaries start at £30,000), but the strikes were also over workload, staff shortages and funding for basic resources like pencils and textbooks.

Mc Brearty says that one of the key drivers of poor mental health among teachers is work-life balance. The school day may end at about 3pm, but the working day doesn’t. Teachers still have reams of paperwork to do — including form-filling for safeguarding issues or students with special needs — on top of lesson planning and marking. “We have to get a grip on workload,” Mc Brearty says. “The World Health Organisation has been really clear that working more than 55 hours a week is seriously damaging to your health. But many teachers are doing that — that’s normal for them.”