Why are schools failing the stress test?

One of the reasons Debra joined the teaching profession was the autonomy she had: “The creativity in creating my lessons, thinking carefully and developing my skills. And I feel that some teachers have lost that autonomy. You know, when there’s an expectation that we all have to do the same thing.”

School leader Debra Rutley is discussing stress in schools, something she says has “gone through the roof.”

Look through recent reports and you will find a stack of stats behind this rise in stress, from worsening pupil behaviour to teachers reporting chronic overwork.

62 per cent of teachers say their job negatively affects their mental health, according to Education Support analysis published this year. Photograph: iStock

While the Government has a vested interest in cracking the stress problem to make teaching a desirable career choice again – the number of new teachers joining the profession was down by 1,400 last year and has been steadily been falling over the past decade – what about the leaders of schools and those responsible for staff wellbeing?

What can they do to tackle stress in schools? And in a world where new ways of working, such as flexible and hybrid, have improved worker wellbeing, can teaching compete?

The headlines on stress

Teaching is considered a stressful occupation. Education continues to be in the top three sectors with high levels of work-related stress, anxiety or depression, along with doctors/healthcare professionals and public service workers, says HSE’s latest data.

According to Education Support’s July report, written to assess the wellbeing impact of Ofsted’s revised approach to inspection (see our news on page 4), 62 per cent of teachers said their job negatively affects their mental health. Teachers have reported drastically lower levels of wellbeing than other professions (half that of the general population according to Ofsted’s 2019 report on teacher wellbeing), so much so that 53 per cent of teachers wonder whether it would have been better to choose another profession entirely. Indeed, over 20 per cent of new teachers quit within two years and a third leave within their first five years, according to recent House of Commons research.

“There’s still a pressure to be outstanding. It’s part of the culture, the psyche.” Photograph: iStock

‘Pressure on everyone’

But teaching has always been stressful to some extent. What’s going on and why does it appear to be much worse?

To find out more, we speak to Andrew* (*for confidentiality, he asked us to use a different name). An ex-teacher who began his career in the 1970s, he was also a senior figure in the education union movement. He is now involved in mental health awareness training for teachers through Mental Health First Aid.

Andrew is therefore qualified to give a broad view, and is helpfully precise when explaining the main factors, as he sees them, behind the stress problem. Number one, is the growing shortage of teachers including qualified teachers, with traditional Qualified Teacher Status, not a legal requirement in the English state school sector since 2010: “On day one of the job, that teacher has never done a thing (in teaching) and because of that, they are overwhelmed and go off sick with stress. The school then ushers in other teachers to cover their classes, who then have no time to do their planning and assessment. It brings pressure to everyone.”

The second is what he describes as an unhealthy targets-driven culture. Ofsted recently removed its single word judgments and overhauled its system for inspecting schools after headteacher Ruth Perry killed herself when her primary school was judged “inadequate”. But there’s work to be done, says Andrew. “There’s still a pressure to be outstanding. It’s part of the culture, the psyche.”

Raising the Nation Play Commission’s inquiry this year criticised the “highly pressurised accountability system” which has led many schools and teachers to “view breaktimes as nothing more than a loss of valuable teaching time”. Secondary and primary schools have cut break times, leading to 65 minutes less play on average a week compared with 20 years ago, with “dire consequences for [children’s] mental and physical health”.

Andrew agrees: “Children should be allowed to have fun, to enjoy themselves, to sort things out, which is what the play time was about but we haven’t got that anymore. One of the reasons there’s a problem with children’s behaviour is that the social aspect of schools has [deteriorated] and it does affect the teachers as well.”

Indeed, 87 per cent of teachers say the number of pupils verbally abusing staff members has increased, with behaviour the second highest cause of stress after workload (NASUWT survey, 2024).

The reduction in play time allowed to children has been cited as a key driver of poor behaviour in classrooms, itself a major cause of teacher stress. Photograph: iStock

The six sources of stress

It’s a complex area but important to consider when starting to view ideas on the table for tackling and reducing stress in schools. Employers have a legal duty to protect employees from stress at work, says HSE, whose Stress Management Standards approach is still considered the gold standard. In 2018 it launched the Talking Toolkit for schools, based on the Standards.

Although based on solid principles (its six key areas of stress to identify and manage are Demands, Control, Support. Relationships, Role and Change) with some good advice around what Ofsted do and do not require, there’s not much evidence employers are using it. According to the CIPD health and wellbeing at work report 2025, HSE’s stress management standards were the least popular tool for identifying and reducing stress – just 10 per cent compared to 52 per cent that used EAPs.

Andrew says more intervention on stress from HSE could help: “The bottom line is that without enforcement and without putting anything out there for people that they should be doing it, if teaching is anything to go by few employers are actually doing it.”

Bringing teaching into the 21st century

Flexible working has exploded since the pandemic in the wider workforce. The Government wants to encourage schools to catch up, with the lack of “meaningfully flexible working in teaching one of the factors driving teachers out of the profession”, according to Education Support’s Commission on Teacher Retention’s report, 1970s working conditions in the 2020s.

Debra Rutley is CEO of Aspire Schools in Buckinghamshire, a group of schools catering primarily for children who have not been successful in mainstream school provision. Many of its pupils have serious behavioural issues, including self-harm.

An ambassador for the Government’s two-year-long flexible working support programme for Multi-Academy Trusts and Schools, Debra explains how flexible working – something she has championed for 20 years – has been key to retaining staff who work in challenging circumstances: “We allow teachers to have their planning and preparation time at home, you can go home and put the washing on. Sometimes in schools we’ve been obsessed with being present all the time. Teachers are the last ones to leave the building. Well, we’re not about that. We think that given the fact that we need extraordinary people in our schools this is a way to recruit and retain extraordinary people, so that they’ve got the ability to give as much as they can to the children.”

Job sharing, compressed hours and personal days are other options being discussed and shared through the government programme. What would Debra say to people who say these aren’t feasible to do in schools? “I think that’s people with their head in the sand,” she says resolutely. “Some people talk about consistency, that you need the same teacher in front of the children all the time. And I would say, well, you could have consistently bad, consistently tired. Consistently doesn’t want to be there because they’re stressed. I would rather have two members of staff who are happy in their job and offer consistency of approach to the children.”

Teachers work on average 51 hours a week, or 10.2 hours a day, according to Ofsted. Could artificial intelligence be a game changer in tackling teacher workload? Science teachers using ChatGPT for lesson planning led to a 31 per cent reduction time spent on the task, found a National Foundation for Educational Research trial.

“Schools can play a key role in retention, keeping workload manageable and use AI to help with planning,” said NFER’s school workforce lead, Jack Worth. “There’s more research needed but real promise for using these tools to support teachers.”

Conclusion

So, stress in schools – what’s the answer? It depends on how we see the problem and where it’s stemming from. Rising levels of poor behaviour won’t be tackled if we point the finger solely at children, with some saying a targets-obsessed culture is heaping too much pressure on them and their teachers.

While this is a systemic issue and beyond the control of a single school leader or team, some old as well as new ideas discussed here do offer potential solutions to tackle stress.

Stress can often be brushed aside, something that we feel when rushing to catch a train on time, it comes and goes. But if you take away a person's autonomy - going back to the Control aspect of HSE's Standards, a person's say in how they do their work - that is a cause of stress and it's deeply concerning.

Teaching was always a stressful job, but it was meant to be a rewarding one too. Those rewards come from bringing what we call in health and safety, ‘your whole self to work’. “Teaching is an oddity in that it is governed by the bell and by a routine,” says Andrew. “Every Monday is the same. You can’t go to the toilet until 12 o’clock. But within those lessons it’s so different. You have to adapt. It’s been said to me by a colleague who worked in digital analysis – she quit it because it was boring. Showing your initiative, being creative are all factors that keep people in teaching but the need to supply massive lesson plans and do extra work outside of hours is eating away at that.” It’s important that in the drive to succeed, we don’t end up driving away our teachers.