So, will this be the year of wellbeing?
I hope that this blog finds you refreshed, renewed, inspired and excited about the school year ahead. I always used to get a feeling of potential to be achieved when I worked in school, with the year stretching in front of us and what that might bring for us as a school community. New pencils, clean buildings, the smell of recently varnished hall floors, new shoes, new uniform, jet planes meeting in the air to be refuelled (you know how the song goes!). There is nothing so powerful as potential and the opportunity to do things differently.
A chance to pause, reflect and reset
The summer break gives us the opportunity to step back and review the previous year and, before we consign it to the past, to look at things we might do differently in the school year ahead.
As I suppose is the case for many reading this blog, my friends are often teachers, school leaders and those who have retired. The thing that struck me over the summer was that the vast majority of those friends I was catching up with, especially those retiring, talked about the impact that the job was having or had had upon them, and especially their health.
When putting the job first comes at a cost
Their concerns outlined years of putting the school and the children in the school first, above their own health and wellbeing. Concerns included being overweight with an unhealthy diet, health issues starting to come to the surface, including blood pressure issues, a lack of time to engage in activity that supports their physical health and a lack of time for activities to support their mental health.
What this does, year after year, is to store up problems that will inevitably result in ill health, unless we do something proactively about it.
“Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise…”
Edward Stanley, a 19th-century politician, used the following quote to sum up the situation perfectly:
“Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise
will sooner or later have to find time for illness”
In essence, he was saying that no matter what we do in life, if we don’t prioritise our health and wellbeing, we will in time become ill, often at the most inopportune time.
The reality of workload in education
The problem is that the job can consume you, and it is never done. Unlike some other jobs where you can work set hours, teaching will take every waking hour if you let it.
The Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders report shows that, against a contractual obligation of 32.5 hours per week, teachers and leaders are working towards double those hours.
Working lives of teachers and leaders: wave 2 summary report
If 58 hours per week was a one-off week, where the workload was exceptional for that week, then that would be doable, but teachers and leaders working almost double their contracted hours is not going to end well, and my concern is that the resultant health issues aren’t warning signs, they are your body saying, enough!
We need to make wellbeing part of the culture
It is a job whose hunger for more from those who work in it is never satiated. Do I believe government should legislate to protect those working in schools from excessive workload? Yes, but we can do so much more as teachers and leaders to protect ourselves.
Wellbeing (where wellbeing is defined as your state of physical, mental and emotional health) is the way we develop a programme against this backdrop which protects us now and into the future. The foundations for our future health and wellbeing start in our 20s, but it is never too late.
Building a wellbeing culture in schools
This September, we begin our first online course for the development of a wellbeing culture which supports you and your school. It is a year full of resources which allows you to build the wellbeing culture for your school or trust that is bespoke to you, but with the legwork taken out.
We have 8 schools in our first cohort who are all committed to the principle that wellbeing has to be lived and part of the culture, and not a tick-box exercise. It critically links schools so that not only can they benefit from the resource we’ve created for them, but they can have an ongoing reference group to support future wellbeing developments for their school community.
If your school is interested in this work and has a live policy with us, then we can support your school/trust too.
What about your own wellbeing?
In the meantime, if you are a teacher reading this without the ability to shape the leadership of wellbeing in your school, you may want to decide that you want to build your own wellbeing plan for yourself.
I have a planner which allows you to do just that, and I’m happy to run a session for interested teachers if that works for you. It wouldn’t be any more than half an hour at most.
Could this be the year we take action?
I do hope that this year is the year of wellbeing action for you and your school/trust, where we can start to rebalance the impact of the education system and its demands on our health and wellbeing, providing for better health now and building better health into all of our futures.
Andy Mellor
National Director of Wellbeing