I have spent a considerable amount of time over the last few years thinking, talking and working with school leaders around the issue of staff wellbeing. I remain convinced – and the data produced by Education Support reinforces this – that it is one of the most significant challenges facing our profession. But I have also become increasingly uncomfortable with the language we use to describe it and, perhaps more importantly, with some of the assumptions that sit behind our response to what has increasingly been described as a ‘wellbeing crisis’.
I do not think this crisis exists because school leaders do not care about the wellbeing of their staff. In my experience, most care a great deal. Nor do I think there is a lack of awareness that there is a problem.
The difficulty is that our understanding of staff wellbeing can sometimes be too simplistic and, when our understanding of the problem is too simplistic, the solutions we develop are likely to be similarly limited.
That leads us, I think, to begin with the wrong question.
In schools, the question leaders often start with is:
“What can we do to improve staff wellbeing?”
There is nothing unreasonable about that. Indeed, in a profession where workload remains high, recruitment and retention are significant concerns and the demands placed upon teachers and school leaders have become increasingly complex, it would be worrying if leaders were not asking it.
The difficulty is what sometimes follows.
If we understand wellbeing primarily as something that needs to be improved for staff, our response can easily become a collection of things that we do for staff: wellbeing days, social events, cakes in the staffroom, breakfasts, yoga, thank-you cards, access to counselling or an early finish at the end of term.
I want to be careful here, because I do not subscribe to the rather dismissive view that these things are somehow pointless.
They are not.
These are examples of what I have come to call ‘signals of care’ from leaders – and they can matter a great deal. A leader noticing that somebody is struggling matters. Creating opportunities for colleagues to spend time together matters. Saying thank you matters. In schools where people feel genuinely known and valued, these seemingly small things can contribute to a strong sense of community and belonging.
The mistake is believing that these ‘signals of care’ constitute a strategy for wellbeing.
A member of staff whose workload has become unreasonable does not primarily have a wellbeing problem. They have a workload problem.
A teacher who feels that their professional judgement is routinely ignored does not need to become more resilient. There is an issue of professional trust that needs addressing.
A teaching assistant who spends too much of the school day completing tasks that have little connection with supporting children to learn may not need a ‘signal of care’. What is needed is for leaders to look strategically at how we have designed their work.
And somebody repeatedly asked to complete what they consider to be a ‘purposeless task’ – which everyone quietly suspects has little impact on pupil outcomes – is unlikely to feel considerably better about it because there is cake in the staffroom.
The cake can still be nice.
But it does not solve the underlying problem.
This distinction has become increasingly important to me because there is a risk that, with the best of intentions, leaders tend to individualise issues that are actually organisational problems.
This means that we tend to talk about how staff can be resilient, ensure self-care and manage stress. We encourage colleagues to exercise, sleep properly, establish boundaries and make time for the things they enjoy outside work. There is good evidence and common sense behind much of that advice. People do have some agency over their own wellbeing and organisations cannot take responsibility for every aspect of somebody’s life.
But something else is also true.
Employers have considerable influence over the conditions in which people work.
School leaders decide how meetings are organised. We influence the volume and purpose of monitoring. We decide how communication operates. We introduce new initiatives. We determine how much agency people have over their work. We decide what gets prioritised and, importantly, whether anything gets removed when something new is added.
Those decisions shape people’s experience of work every day.
That is why I have become increasingly interested in a slightly different question:
“What is it about the experience of working in our organisation that helps people to flourish, and what gets in the way?”
The difference may appear subtle, but I think it changes the conversation considerably.
Rather than beginning with a wellbeing activity, it begins with how work can be strategically designed to support wellbeing in the workplace.
This has led me towards the idea of Workplace Fulfilment.
I am not proposing Workplace Fulfilment as simply another name for wellbeing, because wellbeing is multifaceted and dynamic – health, relationships, finances, community involvement and work all play a role in wellbeing. What I am aiming to do is to clarify that while work is one aspect of a person’s overall wellbeing – it is the main area that school leaders can influence.
Nor am I suggesting that every moment of work should somehow be enjoyable – naïve cheerfulness is not a strategic approach to wellbeing. Anyone who has spent time working in schools would recognise how unrealistic that would be.
Schools are demanding places.
Teaching thirty children well is difficult. Supporting pupils with increasingly complex needs is difficult. Working alongside families experiencing considerable challenge can be difficult. Leading people through change is difficult. There will be times when people are tired, frustrated and under pressure, however thoughtful the organisation or its leaders may be.
The aim cannot be to remove every demand from work.
Indeed, some of the most fulfilling experiences of our professional lives come from doing things that were extremely demanding.
Most school staff can probably identify periods when they have worked extraordinarily hard but nevertheless finished with a strong sense that the effort was worthwhile. Equally, most of us will have experienced the peculiar frustration that comes from spending significant time completing something that appears to have very little purpose.
These are not the same experience.
There is a difference between being tired because the work was difficult and being depleted because the work felt pointless.
That distinction deserves much more attention.
It takes us towards questions of purpose, agency, relationships, belonging, competence and professional trust. It also requires us to think much more carefully about the way work is organised and the extent to which the everyday experience of staff aligns with the values that schools claim to hold.
This matters particularly in education because almost everything we do can be justified.
There is nearly always a reason for one more meeting, another document, another intervention, another piece of monitoring or another request for information. Individually, each may appear entirely reasonable.
The problem emerges cumulatively.
Over time, organisations add things far more readily than they remove them.
And because almost everything can ultimately be connected to improving outcomes for children, the phrase “it is for the children” can unintentionally become a justification for an almost unlimited amount of work.
That cannot be sustainable.
Nor, I think, is it an adequate expression of our moral purpose.
If our purpose is genuinely to secure the best possible education for children, then the time, energy and expertise of the adults working with them are precious resources. How we use those resources matters.
This is where I think the wellbeing conversation needs to develop.
The challenge is not to care less about staff wellbeing. It is to take it seriously enough that we stop treating it primarily as an additional activity.
Instead, we need to strategically look at the architecture of work.
- At what we ask people to do.
- At why we ask them to do it.
- At how much control they have over their professional lives.
- At whether the systems we create help them to do good work or sometimes make good work harder.
And, perhaps most difficult of all, at whether leaders are prepared to stop doing things which once had a purpose but no longer justify the time they consume – what I call, The Pruning of Purposeless Work’.
These are leadership questions rather than wellbeing questions.
Which is why I am increasingly less interested in asking school leaders:
“What do you do for staff wellbeing?”
I think a more revealing question is:
“What is it actually like to work in your school?”
And then, perhaps, an even more challenging one:
“How much of that experience has been shaped by decisions that leaders have the power to change?”
That is the territory I want to explore through my work on Workplace Fulfilment.
Not because wellbeing no longer matters.
But because it matters too much to leave it to wellbeing initiatives.
I am currently developing these ideas through my forthcoming book on Workplace Fulfilment and through my work with schools and trusts through Laviss Education Consultancy.
