What can school leaders do to ensure they prioritise wellbeing for their staff?

What does ‘well-being’ actually mean in the teaching profession and is it possible to achieve and maintain?

Teaching is known to be one of the most demanding and challenging professions with many teachers experiencing burnout and the profession as a whole experiencing a high attrition rate.

So what can school leaders do to ensure they prioritise wellbeing for their staff? In her article Supporting teachers to support learners: Prioritising teacher wellbeing for optimal student outcomes, Cara Carey looks at six areas of research from mental health to managing workload, in an attempt to outline methods of practice to ensure teachers have the capacity to effectively create better learning environments.

As well as looking into empirical research into wellbeing, it’s always good to see what school leaders are doing to improve standards for their staff.

Jan Balon – Headteacher at London Academy of Excellence, agreed to share some strategies with us:

At London Academy of Excellence, we have;

1) A very proactive flexible working policy for teachers and non-teachers, right from the point of advertising (where we’d almost always advertise roles as full or part time), to interview, to regular reminders about the possibility of flexible working requests. This means that nearly 50% of our staff work part time, which has a significant impact on wellbeing in our experience.

2) A line management policy which makes wellbeing (of both staff and students) the first item in all meetings, with flexible application of leave of absence policies the norm.

3) An engaged staff consultative group who meet regularly with me to ensure that staff voice genuinely feeds into the development planning cycle for the school.

4) A (small but important) culture of staff thank yous in every Friday briefing (staff nominate each other) and one nominee is chosen each week for a small prize, with other nominees all receiving a thank you email every Friday. We’ve done this for more than two years and it is really good for staff morale!

To be honest, more important than any of this is a culture and values which nearly all staff understand and buy into. We try very hard to frame everything we do in terms of the agreed goals of the school. If it doesn’t fit with our mission don’t do it. Then recruit staff who share the sense of mission.

To understand more about teachers wellbeing, check out the Teachers’ Union NASUWT Teacher Wellbeing Survey 2022, which ran from mid-December 2021 to early January 2022.

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