How Do You Improve Staff Wellbeing in School?

Staff wellbeing is a key issue in any workplace, but it’s acutely felt in schools. With one in three teachers considering leaving the profession, protecting staff wellbeing is essential to ensuring the longevity of teachers’ careers.

Looking after staff is, of course, one of a great many tasks school leaders have to juggle, so we’ve done the homework to provide you with some ideas to improve staff wellbeing.

Support Each Other

Your fellow staff members will naturally feel stressed when faced with high workload, high expectations, overlapping responsibilities and accountability – all common pressures to school staff. So they need to know that their leaders and colleagues have their backs.

Ensuring mutual support means creating a culture and a community where staff feel able to ask for support when they’re feeling stressed. Nothing heightens stress more than feeling like you have to deal with it alone, so how can you make sure staff know they’re supported?

The ‘work family’ metaphor is a feature of many workplaces and for good reason – if people feel connected, it makes it easier to deal with difficult situations. Consider how can you foster that culture and become a champion for your colleagues.

Be Proactive

Unfortunately, high workloads and expectations seem ingrained in the current education system. It’s tough for school staff to deal with expectations from the DfE, governors, parents… It’s a lot and we can’t pretend otherwise.

But by acknowledging these difficulties, we can at least be proactive in addressing them. Don’t wait for issues like high workload and burnout to become problems. Consider what you can do now to minimise their negative effects.

In her previous role as a headteacher, our Schools Consultant Lorna gave staff the option to take PPA time at home, which is a great way to help staff manage their work-life balance and show that you trust them to do it properly, too.

When you review school policies, considering any changes in terms of staff workload is a proactive way to ensure you’re taking your staff’s needs into account. For example, you could consider introducing something like Parent Time to help you schedule parent-teacher meetings, giving staff the opportunity to schedule meetings around family commitments.

Regularly getting staff feedback on how they’re feeling can help you gauge what changes you can make to provide more support.

Minimise Admin

Based on teachers’ responses to a Teacher Tapp survey, administrative tasks regularly make more than 40% of teachers feel stressed or unhappy, second only to student behaviour. Unfortunately, we can’t take away everyone’s marking, but there are ways to reduce other administrative tasks using technology.

For example, Studybugs Attendance can automate absence reporting, freeing up 30 days of staff time every year. We can also automatically alert staff about attendance concerns, so staff don’t have to spend time analysing data and can instead be notified automatically, allowing them to focus more on the pastoral side of their role – which is obviously more rewarding.

Support the Right to Switch Off

Ensure staff feel like they can have time to themselves. Little touches like providing fresh fruit in the staffroom and avoiding meetings outside school hours can help staff feel valued.

You could also implement initiatives like sending no emails outside of school hours (or make it clear that staff don’t have to reply), and do what you can to ensure teachers minimise the amount of marking they take home – like providing uninterrupted PPA time.

Remember to Look After Yourself

Of course, you’ll need to be in a good place yourself to think about how you can support others. Remember to cut yourself some slack, build in time for yourself and practice self-care. And if you develop a nurturing culture in your school, your colleagues will have your back, too.

Hopefully, these ideas will get you excited about the prospect of fostering a culture of good staff wellbeing in school. Just writing this blog post has got me feeling very zen. Namaste!

— Lucas Abbott