Improving Teacher Wellbeing By Managing Workload
Staff motivation begins with staff wellbeing
Supporting staff when teacher workload spikes is one of the most important and challenging tasks a school or department faces during the year. Having stressed out teaching staff benefits nobody, and keeping workloads manageable during mock exam week, or during other internal tests and exams is crucial towards providing a healthy and happy educational environment.
Where to start?
There are many ways a school can help to make workloads easier. By streamlining communication, fostering healthy relationships, and monitoring work levels, teachers will feel less overloaded. It is also important that they have outlets when they are overwhelmed by workloads, so heads of departments have the information necessary to distribute work more equitably, and provide practical support to enable teachers to support their students in turn.
Improving staff retention and satisfaction
When staff have that help to manage spikes in workload from within the school they will feel listened to and supported. When teaching staff have manageable workloads, they will have improved mental wellbeing overall, and the school will experience reduced rates of staff sickness and turnover, and improved rates of retention and satisfaction.
Mental health support for teaching staff
In a fast-paced teaching environment, it may be easy to overlook improving teacher wellbeing and mental health as an important factor, but it is of course, absolutely vital to long term educational success. If you aim to create and maintain a positive nurturing environment demonstrating mental health leadership, establishing a mental health lead, or documenting mental health supportive policies is absolutely paramount in a mental health strategy.
Some statistics on teacher wellbeing in 2023:
- 78% of education staff experience long term stress
- 89% of department heads experienced stress
- 95% of head teachers reported long term stress
- 36% of school teachers experienced burnout
Source: educationsupport.org.uk
These shocking figures illustrate the challenges facing the whole educational system in the 2020s. With over 1 in 3 teachers burning out, the turnover rates and staff losses risk becoming astronomical. Making piecemeal attempts towards emotional wellbeing will not address this problem.
How we can help
By allowing specialist external markers and assessors to mark mock exams you can save your school or department considerable time and money. Our experienced and specialised team will be able to mark faster and more efficiently than teaching staff, and this also gives staff back their time to work on delivering better lessons to their students.
The ultimate benefit of improved teacher wellbeing is to the pupils. Teachers will be more relaxed, and can spend more time in the classroom and planning lessons.