“We’re working every night, every weekend”: How teacher burnout is fuelling the student mental health crisis
The classroom is not a particularly happy place to be at the moment. Charlotte (not her real name), a 25-year-old Year 3 teacher in south-east London, can attest to that. Covid-19 restrictions are no more, but schools, and their pupils, are far from back to normal. “When we started last September, we were inheriting children with huge gaps,” Charlotte says. Children in her class had barely started school when the first lockdown hit. “We're really feeling it now.”
Some of the children in Charlotte’s class are struggling to interact with others on the playground. Many are working well below the standard expected of children their age. One boy has started “lashing out” violently at staff and classmates, which Charlotte believes is an attempt to manage his pandemic-induced anxiety.
Children’s mental health was in crisis before the pandemic. In 2017, one in nine six to 16-year-olds were living with a mental disorder, according to NHS Digital. Now, that figure has increased to one in six. A report published earlier this month in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine highlighted that teachers are on the frontline of this crisis, often poised as the first point of contact for children struggling with their mental health. But teachers are struggling too.
At Christmas, Charlotte hit breaking point. Teaching had left her feeling anxious and stressed and she sought mental health support. “I was coming home and not eating properly, not sleeping properly, and feeling very emotional. I was probably a nightmare to be around,” she says now, with a laugh that indicates the situation was anything but funny. By this point, she had been a fully qualified teacher for just three months.
Charlotte’s story is not a new or an uncommon one. Teachers’ workloads have been astronomically high for years and retention rates have been on a downward spiral for more than a decade, particularly for newly qualified staff. The pandemic, however, has been an untameable beast, creating a new set of impossible hoops for teachers to flaggingly leap through. According to the National Education Union, two-thirds of its members feel the profession has got worse — seven in 10 say their workload has increased, and more than a third say they “definitely” won’t be working in education in five years’ time.
“Teacher workloads are just absolutely enormous,” says Kimberley Evans, a teacher and owner of Nourish The Workplace, a programme aimed at improving school staff wellbeing. “None of the workload went away [during the pandemic]. Teachers have just had more on top.” The 44-year-old cites the return of Ofsted inspections, Covid-19 absences, and helping children to catch up as just some of the additional burdens on teachers.
These stresses, Evans says, are stealing space that would otherwise be used to address nuanced signs of a child struggling with mental health needs, such as not eating their lunch, or changes in their behaviour. “Staff are definitely thinking about these things because they still care massively. But then it just gets dropped down the list,” she says. “They desperately want to be there for these children but they're completely at capacity and boiling over.”
Charlotte agrees. “I think the problem is, there's a lot of pressure to fill the academic gaps,” she says. Yesterday, the Department for Education unveiled a new schools white paper, outlining higher English and Maths GCSE targets, alongside previously announced targets to increase the number of children leaving school with the expected standard of maths, reading and writing. Meeting these targets will fall on the backs of teachers across the country.
“What the government expects does not fit into the hours of the day,” says Abi, a 35-year-old primary school teacher in the East Midlands. “Teachers are swept off their feet. We're all working into the evening, every night, most weekends. You don't have any time in the day.” She believes that students are seen as numbers, not children. By way of the system, hitting targets comes first, everything else, including mental health, “falls by the wayside”.
At Abi’s school, overall mental health and wellbeing provisions are limited. Once a week, she’ll sit down with her class to do ‘mindfulness’, or, as she puts it, a “piece of colouring”. “For children that have actual mental health issues, that isn’t going to help them,” she says. “It’s like ticking a box.” When Abi does raise concerns about a child, it often goes unresolved, as it won’t meet the threshold for support from NHS child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS). The NHS currently aims to treat just one third of children with a diagnosable mental health condition. “So all it does is go on a piece of paper,” Abi says.
Designated mental health support is largely lacking, but certainly varied, at all schools across the country. At Charlotte’s school, a pastoral lead was introduced just this year, but the individual is also a class teacher, and so is time-starved like other staff members. Abi’s school also has two emotional support assistants, but their training expired several years ago.
It's a similar picture at different stages and types of education, too, with teachers having to step in as untrained, overworked mental health support workers. Mary, a 49-year-old humanitarian worker in Richmond-upon-Thames, has two teenage daughters, both at private schools, and both who have struggled with their mental health. Her eldest daughter developed an eating disorder following the third lockdown in winter 2020 and found eating lunch with other students triggering. Her teachers stepped in. “My daughter would sometimes eat just one on one with different teachers, and that made a huge difference,” Mary says. “That helped her get through it, but at the cost of that personal time for the teacher.” Mary is aware that this meant teachers gave up their own lunchtime, which may have been used to mark, plan lessons, or, perhaps, eat. Her gratitude is palpable through the phone.
There is an overwhelming sense of guilt from teachers, that, even though they are going beyond their means to help those children who are struggling, they are not doing enough. “It's really horrible, actually,” says Charlotte. “Because you do go home and you think ‘I'm not doing everything I can do.’ But I literally can't. I don't have the time.” It is troubling, though not surprising, that teachers report high levels of stress related to the role — a 2021 survey by charity Education Support found that 77 per cent of education staff experienced symptoms of poor mental health due to their work.
“Teacher burnout is a serious issue that affects teachers’ ability to teach effectively and to promote children’s positive mental health,” says Chloe Lowry, who co-authored the report published this month in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. “Given the current climate of poor teacher and pupil mental health, it’s easy to see how this could create a vicious cycle of poor mental health in schools.” However, Lowry also stresses that regardless of burnout, a lack of specific training means teachers simply aren’t equipped to effectively promote children’s emotional wellbeing.
Farah*, a 42-year-old teacher at a college in east London, was able to access just one hour of online training on student mental health throughout the pandemic. It was helpful, she says, but she wasn’t supposed to be in the session at all — the training was only open to certain teachers. Farah and a colleague snuck into the Zoom session, hoping to go unnoticed. “The fact that we had to sneak into mental health training was really silly. I think it should be rolled out to everybody,” says Farah. The need is more pressing now than ever, she says. “I've never had this many students with mental health issues before.” The college’s funding for mental health support has since been cut.
It is a catch 22 situation. CAMHS accessibility varies wildly across the country, and so parents and their children are turning to schools for support — a 2017 NHS Digital report found that children with mental health needs were almost twice as likely to go to teachers for support than a mental health specialist. Education staff are overstretched and underfunded, while there is very little on student mental health during teacher training. The support they provide, though vital, is not as rigorous as is needed. Children don’t receive the help they need, and teacher wellbeing declines. Everyone is worse off.
“We are supporting teachers to help children and young people to recover from the emotional impact of the pandemic, including by offering training to senior mental health leads in every state school and college by 2025,” a Government spokesperson told The Guardian earlier this month. “To support pupils with more complex needs, we have also invested an additional £79m to expand children’s mental health services and accelerate the rollout of mental health support teams, which will give nearly three million children in England access to health experts through school or college by April 2024.”
For Lowry, though, this proposed support falls “woefully short” of what is required. “Firstly,” she says, “every single teacher needs training in children’s mental health, not just one senior mental health lead per school.” She also says the funding boost, initially announced in 2021, doesn’t go far enough. “The government is still not aiming to treat the majority of children with a diagnosable mental health disorder,” she says. “That isn’t good enough.” The solution is multifaceted, according to Lowry. She wants to see teaching training on children’s mental wellbeing, and sustainable, proportionate Government investment in the area.
“The want is there and we know what we need to do,” says Charlotte. “But we just don't have enough staff.” When Charlotte sits down with her colleagues in their staff room, exhausted by another day, they all agree on what they want: a designated school therapist. “We need something like that, to work with those children that are really struggling, and it just comes down to the budget,” she says. “We can't afford it.”
For Abi, it comes down to funding, and time, too. “If we want to improve children's mental health - which we should, it is massively important, we know that now - we need to put money into schools to pay for it,” she says.
In the meantime, she will continue doing mindful colouring with her class. She will continue running after school clubs, preparing for Ofsted, marking work, planning lessons, supervising lunchtimes and trying, desperately, to support the children and parents who need it most.
“You just do the best you can,” Abi says. “That’s all you can do. Just do your best.”
*Names changed for anonymity purposes
