Teacher wellbeing: Creating a great place to work

Teaching is incredibly professionally fulfilling and the rewarding nature of the role means that teachers can achieve job satisfaction unmatched by most professions. However, increasing workloads and endless admin can have a detrimental impact on wellbeing, where teachers’ time is spent in ways that don't effectively utilise their knowledge and expertise.

Reducing admin and ensuring positive collaboration, wherever possible

Whether it’s communicating with parents or the paperwork associated with managing pupil behaviour, it’s easy for day-to-day admin to overburden already busy teams. Specific policies in place may require a follow-up process, such as sending an email to a parent or guardian after a specific number of days. Yet some schools overlook the importance of ensuring that there is the administrative infrastructure in place to support teachers with the enactment of such policies.

For teachers, this can be incredibly unfulfilling - they’ve chosen this profession so that they can teach, and yet more and more time is handed over to data input or communication.

Anything that detaches from a teacher's sense of purpose will start to impact their sense of wellbeing, longer-term. To prevent this from happening, schools should regularly review how teachers are spending their time and act on any concerning trends through an evaluation of their administrative support. By doing this, schools can ensure that they are providing teachers with the time to design or deliver a high quality subject curriculum.

This might be reviewing the time that teachers have available to receive information, give feedback, meet or collaborate, for instance. There are a range of schools and trusts implementing regular, structured time within their meeting schedules over the academic year to ensure that communication is balanced.

Similarly, this can help to ensure that teams are not simply gathering in a room to hear information that is not directly relevant or helpful to their role, or will detract them from time that could be spent collaborating with colleagues regarding the quality of classroom delivery or incisive coaching sessions designed to help them to improve.

These meetings should provide teachers with an opportunity to normalise the hurdles or errors that they’ve encountered whilst teaching content, discussing them with colleagues and identifying how others may have approached the particular point of delivery. Similarly, teachers can evaluate the curriculum that’s being delivered and identify any opportunities for a team’s professional development.

Implementing new technology

To help overcome these issues and ensure balanced workloads, technology is being used more and more in schools – both for back-office functions such as HR and also classroom-based technology to teach the students.

However, knowing where to start when choosing particular technology and also training teams on how to use new technology can feel completely overwhelming. To ensure that the implementation of a new system is a success, there are a number of factors school leaders should consider:

• Establish a robust working group that can be involved in the planning, pre-implementation and roll-out of the new system. This group might comprise parents, teachers, support staff – anyone who might be impacted by the software. Each of these key stakeholders will view the system through a different lens, allowing decision makers to form a well-rounded view of the strengths and limitations of the system.
• Once a decision has been made on the software, a timeline should be put in place for implementation and review, with agreed criteria of what effective enactment will look like . Ask the working group responsible for using the software to review whether or not it is delivering the expected outcomes. It’s not uncommon for the first few months to throw-up some challenges or hurdles, so conducting these reviews over the course of a year is beneficial.
• Further down the line, ensuring the working group then consider how to train and develop other colleagues on how to use the software is crucial, ensuring a collaborative approach is followed during the school-wide roll-out and all stakeholders have the opportunity to provide ongoing feedback about the degree to which the system benefits them.

With wellbeing an increasingly important topic within schools, it’s important to ensure that any issues around workload or unintuitive processes are addressed, allowing teachers time back to focus on the reason that they joined the profession in the first place - to teach.