Finger painting offered to ease teachers’ stress

TEACHERS are being offered finger-painting classes and “knit and natter” sessions to help them cope with workrelated stress, an education conference has heard.

Members of the NASUWT union said homework marking, administration emails and late-night Whatsapp messages from headteachers are “grinding down” their members’ morale.

Schools are now reportedly rolling out wellbeing classes that can include afternoons of golf and mindfulness exercises, to improve their staff ’s mental health.

Union member Owain Morgan-Lee, from Flintshire, North Wales, told the union’s annual conference in Birmingham yesterday that his colleagues are “popping pills” to “cheer themselves up because the job is dragging them down to a point where their health is in a serious, serious, condition”.

Addressing the audience, he recalled receiving an email offering him the chance “to do some finger painting up in the art department for a couple of hours”.

“Maybe I could play golf with Mr Evans on the school field. I might decide to do ‘knit and natter’ in the textile department,” he said. Mr Morgan-Lee said he had opted for a mindfulness session in which he was asked to think about eating a grape while lying down on the “sweaty, cold, hall floor”.

“I wondered how many more seconds or minutes I’d have to do that for, before the stress, the anxiety, the fear of going back into the classroom and logging on to my school emails, how many more minutes I’d have to do that for before … I reached nirvana,” he said.

In a survey of more than 4,000 of its members across the UK, 62 per cent said their workload had “increased significantly” in the past 12 months. Other data showed nearly 3,000 respondents were working 57 hours per week, on average, and 15 of them outside school hours.

Damien McNulty, a union member, told the conference “telephones and tablets, smartphones are turned on” and school leaders’ response to emails going unanswered out of working hours was to “set up WhatsApp groups which ding and ping all evening when you’re trying to get some rest and relaxation”. Teachers voted to campaign for educators to have limits set on their working hours.

◆ Girls’ uniforms should not be light grey because they can worsen period poverty, teachers have said. Elaine Paling, a NASUWT member, said the colour was “not helpful” for menstruating pupils.