Stress in the classroom is threatening our schools
IT IS half-term week for many schools, and debatable whether children or their teachers are more in need of the break.
That is because the schools broke up against the backdrop of one of the most worrying assessments in recent times about the emotional state of the men and women we trust with the education and care of young people.
Stress, that curse of so many workplaces, is relentlessly tightening its grip on teachers, undermining their health and even driving some out of the profession they love so much that is less a career than a vocation.
There are in our classrooms dedicated staff who are crumbling under the pressure they face, whose health and psychological well-being are being ground down by the day-to-day demands on them.
This amounts to a hidden epidemic that needs to be addressed urgently both for the sake of the teachers themselves and, ultimately, for the children whose futures depend so much upon them.
The examples of stress revealed by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers were hair-raising. There was the primary teacher whose partner came home increasingly often to find her on the kitchen floor, sobbing.
Or the teacher whose performance targets included the objective of not crying in the staff room, without any consideration apparently being given as to why she was becoming so upset.
The union’s conclusion was that stress was increasingly being seen as “par for the course”, yet it was leaving teachers so exhausted that they did not feel on top of their workload.
Added to that, a separate survey had found that 59 per cent of teachers overall had considered leaving the profession because of the pressures, with that figure rising to 67 per cent amongst science teachers, long identified as a crucial component in education if Britain is to be economically successful.
The findings paint a picture of a profession under siege from the demands of the job – and possibly the most worrying aspect of all is that the pressure is going to increase.
As with the pressures on the NHS because of a growing population, so schools are going to have to cope with a projected increase of 582,000 pupils over the next five years, requiring an additional 160,000 teachers.
If staff are already struggling with their workloads, there must be serious questions about how they will cope with the demands of more than half a million extra pupils, even if the required number of teachers can be recruited and trained.
Stress rears its ugly head in every workplace at some point, and all teachers would surely acknowledge that over the course of a school year there are periods when it arises and has to be dealt with.
But when it becomes an unrelenting part of every day, its effect is corrosive and compromises the ability of teachers to give of their best.
There is unlikely to be any magic wand that can be waved to eliminate stress in schools, but greater efforts have to be made both locally and nationally to manage it with the aim of bringing it down to levels that staff can tolerate.
Nationally, education has vied with health as the area in which successive governments have exhibited a shared mania for meddling. To those working in schools, the last two decades have felt like a constant round of upheaval as new doctrines and diktats have been introduced.
In the midst of this, too little thought has been expended by governments on the effect at the sharp end – in the classrooms, where teachers have to translate political policy into the reality of providing a good education.
Locally, school managements need to be acutely aware of the pressures staff are under and monitor levels of stress with the aim of early intervention to help those exhibiting signs of distress.
It is not good enough to give a teacher an instruction to stop crying in the staff room without drilling down into the roots of the problems and attempting to address them.
The knowledge that superiors are listening, understanding, and at least trying to help is likely in itself to go some way to bringing levels of stress down to a manageable level.
One way forward is to expand the scope of training for those in managerial roles to place greater emphasis on the pastoral care of staff.
There is, though, another factor in causing stress that is altogether harder to address than the way schools are managed, and that is bad pupil behaviour, cited by many teachers as one of the thorniest problems they face.
Poor parenting of unruly children means that too many go through the school gates with no boundaries set on their behaviour and no respect for teachers’ authority.
Schools must not be afraid to take firm action against such pupils, excluding them if necessary, not only for the sake of their classmates, but for the wellbeing of staff whose stress levels are sent soaring even higher by disruptive or aggressive children.
There are in our classrooms dedicated staff who are crumbling under the pressure they face, whose health and psychological well-being are being ground down.