The Elephant in the Staffroom

How to reduce stress and improve teacher wellbeing

Chris Eyre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781134798308
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Elephant in the Staffroom is the survival guide that every busy teacher needs for practical advice on teacher wellbeing. Written in an informal, conversational style, the book is divided into 40 bite-size chunks, covering a range of essential topics from understanding and avoiding burnout, to successful working patterns, and even surviving the school holidays!

Complemented by a host of top tips, the book focuses on five key themes:

• the psychology of the teacher
• teacher identity
• emotional and physical energy
• keeping focused and investing in yourself
• colleagues, students and inspection

Chapters are designed to be easily dipped in and out of, with each exploring the unique nature of the teaching profession and how to cope with, and conquer, a variety of stress triggers and psychological aspects of teaching – 'elephants' in the staffroom – to survive and succeed.

Written by a head of department with over twenty years of classroom experience, this essential guide offers a wealth of practical advice on stress, work-life balance and organisation, and is a must-read for practising teachers.

Chapter 1
Three things to remember when you forget everything else

It is true of most jobs that you don’t really understand the difficulties and pressures unless you have actually done the job or have lived with someone who has. I occasionally have pipe dreams of owning a small café or possibly improving my fitness by becoming a postman. Yet these brief fantasies usually involve a steady stream of customers coming into the shop, never too many. It is always possible to serve them quickly, I’ve always got exactly what they want, and they’re always happy. In my life as a postman it is always sunny and all packages are correctly addressed. There are no hailstorms, angry dogs or packages that don’t fit into letter boxes.

This brings us to the outsiders’ view of teaching. In this world there are 6- or 7-hour working days, and you get 13 weeks of vacation every year. The students are always attentive and appreciative – an idea gained from watching Dead Poets Society several times, or perhaps from soap operas in which teacher characters are rarely seen preparing lessons, manage to get to the pub each night and are usually able to meet up with another character for an affair in a free period.

However, in the interests of balance, it is equally true that some people within teaching are convinced that they suffer the greatest hardships known to man. The truth, as ever, lies between these extremes. Here are the three most important things to remember about teaching.

1. It could be worse

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Often as teachers we lose perspective. Many of us have never really left education. We went to school, then to college and university, and apart from that brief summer job in the shop, our whole world has been the world of education. Some of us don’t stop to think that there are some pretty unpleasant jobs out there, many of which are paid far less than we earn. On a bad day I remind myself that my father went down a mine every day for over 20 years and on more than one occasion saw colleagues carried out dead or seriously injured. He worked far harder in a physical sense than I will ever do, risked life and limb and earned less than the teachers of his day. Consider the paramedic attending a road traffic accident or the nurse working a Friday night in A & E. How about the people who repair motorways and are outside in all weather? If the point on danger and difficulty doesn’t grab you, what about the mind numbing boredom generated by some jobs? Could you really be happy and fulfilled when you’ve just asked whether they want fries with that to the three hundredth person that day?

Teaching isn’t that bad! Teaching is a job where we get paid a good wage to stand in a room and talk about things that interest us and attempt to impart our enthusiasm to others. We get to interact with people, we have some degree of autonomy and no two days are the same. Of course it is a little more complicated than that, and some positions are easier than others, but hopefully you get the point. Don’t listen to the grumbling voices in the staffroom who try to convince you that the life of a teacher is the hardest life known to man. They don’t really mean it – they are still in the job, after all!

2. It’s not as easy as you think

On the other hand, the lot of the teacher is not as easy as some people think, and there’s good reason to think that it has become significantly harder in recent years. It’s quite infuriating to read articles or listen to phone-ins on education. Everyone has an opinion on how teachers should teach, how often work should be marked, what exams people should sit etc. There is a lack of respect for teachers’ professional expertise. Someone once used the analogy of air travel. When we go on our holidays, we don’t tell the pilot how to do his or her job; we respect the pilot’s expertise. When we are having an operation, we don’t give the surgeon advice on where to make the incision. Yet by and large the wider public don’t always respect the expertise of the teacher. They went to school once, so of course they know how it should be done. However, for most right thinking adults, the experience of having a few children round to play or trying to organise games for a group of children full of food colouring at their son or daughter’s birthday party brings the realisation that it might actually be quite difficult to be in charge of groups of children for several hours.

In addition the teacher’s workload is unusual, and this is not always realised by those outside the profession. Yes, there are generous holidays, even if some of it is spent working, but evenings and weekends in term time are often filled in trying to make sure that everything gets done. Teachers don’t necessarily work longer or shorter hours than anyone else, but the workload is compressed and intense. Surveys suggest a 55–60 hour working week for a teacher in term time is about the norm. If the job is that easy, why is it that half the people in Britain who are trained to teach no longer actually do so? We know that over 40% of newly qualified teachers do not make it to 5 years in the job. The amount of stress related illness and sick days in any school or college is often immense. What conclusions can we draw? Simply that the job is not easy, and not everyone can do it. Don’t allow the uninformed outsider to put you down.

3. The struggle is mainly psychological

So how do we as teachers navigate this minefield? In recent years I have become convinced that the main battle that we face is actually psychological. The pressure on a teacher’s mind is immense. Teachers face the battle in the classroom, where groups of students, each with their own issues, turn up in varying states, ranging from keen to learn to keen to make your life a misery. To do the job well takes a high degree of skill and energy. The demands of increased paperwork, challenging students and microscopic scrutiny of results bring their own pressures. Add to that the criticism of students, parents, managers and the media. There are an awful lot of negative inputs and experiences each day and it is easy for a teacher to end up agreeing that he or she is not up to the job. Yet each day in the classroom we are required to go on as a beacon of positivity and encouragement. The mismatch between what goes into our mind and how we have to perform is draining and cannot be sustained unless we find ways of dealing with these stresses. How we think about ourselves and our role as teachers is crucial in determining whether we survive and succeed in the job. Once we have sorted the psychological, we can begin to deal with the more practical strategies; this we will do in the latter parts of the book.

Questions for reflection

1. If you weren’t a teacher, what job would you do? Realistically would it match teaching for the daily variety, challenge and sense of fulfilment?
2. What things have you done as a teacher that you are proud of that you suspect some of your non-teacher friends would not have been able to do? Hold on to these thoughts.

Chapter 2
You are not alone – statistics and context

Some of the latest information on stress, workload, teacher retention etc. is shocking. The purpose of this chapter is to set a context and to raise awareness. We are not going to stay here and wallow, but it is important that we understand where we are if we are to have any hope of moving on. This chapter aims to address two seemingly simple questions: what is the current situation and what is causing it?

Some statistics and context

There have certainly been some eye catching and alarming statistics thrown around. Recently, the October 2015 YouGov survey carried out for the NUT claimed that 50% of teachers were planning to quit in the next two years. It certainly got people’s attention. Of course there is often a grey area between a few thoughts about quitting and a definite intention – the questions were ambiguous. Equally there is a further gap between intention and action. As much as someone may intend to leave their position, the reality of mortgages and dependents may mean that they ultimately stay. All of this means that the number actually leaving is lower; however, if you think this might be a cause for celebration, then try asking yourself whether you want your own children taught by someone who is desperate to be elsewhere!

Stat attack

• Around 10% of UK teachers leave state sector teaching each year.
• 49,120 teachers left the state sector in 2014; this reduces to 35,980 if you remove the number of retirees.
• In 2011 37% of leavers were retirees. In 2014 this was 27%.
• If retirees are removed from the statistics, the number of leavers in 2014 is 9.2% of the workforce. It was 6.5% in 2010.
• Around half of those leaving teaching stay within the education sector in some form.

(Data taken from Worth, J, Bamford, S, and Durbin, B (2015) Should I Stay or Should I Go? NFER Analysis of Teachers Joining and Leaving the Profession. Slough: NFER.)

Even if the actual figures are significantly lower than the headlines, they are alarming enough. Around 40% of new teachers leave before the end of 5 years in the job and it is estimated that there are as many qualified teachers outside teaching as there are within. The increase in exits from the profession once the retirees are removed from the statistics is quite stark, and the NFER report suggests that although the current situation is stable, the impending surge in pupil numbers in secondary schools may expose a huge gap in the coming years. In fact, proportionally speaking, more secondary school teachers are leaving, and it is some secondary subjects that are under recruiting in terms of trainee numbers.

It’s not about the money

‘On average the wages of teachers that left for another job were 10% lower than those that stayed in teaching’ (Should I Stay or Should I Go, p. 10). Despite the pay freeze that teachers have experienced in the last 5 years, which the teaching unions suggest amount to a 17% pay cut in real terms, we can in most cases rule out money as a factor in people leaving teaching. Bearing in mind the still relatively generous pension, the holidays and a higher than the national average salary, 35,000 leaving teaching each year is extraordinarily high.

Tired teachers – do they jump or are they pushed?

In her recent investigation for Schools Week, Laura McInerney identified the phenomenon of tired teachers. Whilst noting that there is an increasing number of young qualified teachers seeking work abroad, it may be that the ‘tired teacher’ goes some way to explaining the statistics. After all, around 50% of those leaving teaching tend to reappear in education in some form.

‘Tired teachers manifest themselves in at least two forms. Firstly, there are those who become weary of the 50 hour+ working week treadmills and the heavy accountability regimes in their schools. They leave teaching or leave full time teaching and take part time or temporary contracts. They enjoy the teaching, they don’t much care for everything else that comes with it and they want the freedom to move on if they so choose’(McInerney 2015).

Second there are tired teachers who have been deemed to be tired teachers by someone else. They are moved on from a school or college with a neutral reference; they may or may not go back into teaching and, if they do so, it is likely to be short term work or supply. In fact one senior union case worker I spoke to drew attention to the disproportionately high number of staffin their 50s who found themselves subject to capability proceedings. Whilst it is tempting to think that this is no great loss as these are likely to be our weakest teachers, it is worth bearing in mind that what makes good teaching can be quite subjective and that office politics can be quite powerful in some institutions.

What is troubling about both of our tired teacher sub-groups is that they are experienced. Rather than just losing teachers early in their careers who discover the job is not for them, or losing staff in their late 50s who retire early, we are starting to lose people mid-career.

Stress and workload

Most people, when they are being honest, recognise that teaching is a stressful job; it is regularly close to the top in lists of stressed professionals. Most people even understand that in term time teachers work phenomenally hard; only solicitors come close in terms of unpaid overtime. A 2014 ATL study reported that 80% of teachers surveyed felt stressed (the exact same percentage reported in a similar NASUWT survey in 2012) and that 55% believed that their job was having a negative effect on their health and wellbeing (Sellgren 2014).

In summary our problem seems to be one of significant numbers of teachers either leaving the profession, hovering around the edges of teaching as ‘tired teachers’, or hanging in there but becoming increasingly worried about their health and wellbeing as well as their ability to sustain their performance in the long term.

No wonder this is the case. The teachers’ contract is notoriously open ended. It requires that teachers should work 1,265 hours as directed plus ‘such reasonable additional hours as may be needed to enable the effective discharge of their professional duties.’

Given that there are constant changes to the understanding of what an effective discharge of professional duties is, it is hardly surprising that stress and tiredness are on the increase. You are not alone if you are tired, anxious and harbouring thoughts about whether there may be a better way of making ends meet.

So if you are currently in teaching, take a moment to congratulate yourself. Your resilience, particularly if you have done more than 5 years, is to be commended. Remembe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Three things to remember when you forget everything else
• 2 You are not alone – statistics and context
• 3 Stress – getting personal
• PART 1 The mind of the teacher
• PART 2 Identity
• PART 3 Energy
• PART 4 Focus
• PART 5 The others
• Suggestions for further reading
• Index