Tension In The Classroom

Teachers have it easy don’t they? 6 weeks off in the summer, further breaks at Easter, half-term and at Christmas. These days the financial incentives to enter the profession are greater than ever before – and that isn’t just limited to increased salaries. ‘Golden Hellos’ and other tax free ‘signing on’ payments are being offered to new teachers - especially if they plan to specialise in what the government has identified as ‘shortage subjects’. Add to that the fact that they get to finish at 4pm every day and the teacher’s lot appears to be a very happy one. However, scratch the surface of the teaching profession and a different picture emerges.

According to recent research by the British Psychological Society’s (BPS) Division of Occupational Psychology, teachers sit atop the league of the nation’s most stressed out professionals. The BPS study involved 25,000 employees across 24 different occupations and revealed that teachers (alongside Social Workers) had the dubious honour of suffering more from both psychological and physical ill health than almost any other occupation imaginable.

A recent high profile case saw one teacher, who had suffered from two stress-related breakdowns, leave the profession and be awarded compensation of over £250,000.

This clearly has a knock-on effect on pupils – stressed teachers are not going to be operating at their best and consequently children are not going to get the most from their classroom experience.

So why are so many teachers not coping? One Edinburgh teacher told us:

“The profession changed with the advent of targets being set by the educational authorities. Many teachers have welcomed this all along and are aware of the need for continuous professional development. They welcome the opportunity to improve themselves and hone their classroom skills. Others, and I think it’s fair to say that this is not just confined to older, more traditional teachers, find this threatening. They believe that teaching should be about people not targets.

“The biggest change however is in the pupils. Children these days are more aware of the world around them, are more outspoken and opinionated but at the same time are no more mature than previous generations. This imbalance doesn’t help the teacher and certainly doesn’t make relating to the kids any easier.”

According to the National Union of Teachers ‘stress is rooted in the way teaching and schools are organised,’ a view that is clearly shared by the NHS whose guidelines state that work-related stress is a symptom of an organisational problem, not an individual weakness.

Occupational psychologists have concluded that ‘emotional labour’ involving face-to-face contact (sometimes coupled with the suppressing of emotions) is a central factor in what makes a job stressful. The BPS study rated teaching as having a high degree of emotional labour so perhaps it’s no surprise that the profession tops the stress list.

In stark contrast to all of this are the positive experiences of the many mature career changers who every year enter the teaching profession from a diverse range of backgrounds and enjoy professional fulfilment and job satisfaction that they could only ever have dreamt of in their previous roles.

Juliet Harris is one such teacher. Julie managed a finance department before taking a school-based training route into the profession.

"I had had my fill of office politics and always imagined teaching to be an immensely rewarding career. A friend suggested I applied for a place on a local secondary school's in-school training programme. I applied, attended the interview and was accepted. It was recommended to me that I gain as much school experience in advance of beginning training, so I did some shadowing at a local school. Just being in the classroom confirmed that I had made the right career move and I hadn’t even begun training at that point!

“I now have a couple of years experience under my belt and take great pleasure and an equal amount of pride in telling people that I am a teacher. I thrive on the interaction with the pupils and feel that we feed off each other. OK, there are times when I have to be tough and keep up discipline levels in the class but there isn’t a day goes by when I don’t feel that I am making a difference. That may sound clichéd, but I have found that others in my position who have entered the profession via another career and have seen something of the wider world before becoming teachers find the classroom an extremely rewarding and constantly refreshing environment in which to work. They also, in my experience, tend to make very good teachers.”

©Career Media Ltd