Covid-19 has had a catastrophic effect on the mental health and emotional wellbeing of teachers, leaders and support staff across Wales.
Two years of major upheaval and stress coping with lockdowns, remote learning and in-school social distancing have placed an unprecedented strain on professionals at all levels of the education system.
Now, with the pandemic in the rear-view mirror, staff are facing added pressure with the looming implementation of Curriculum for Wales, not to mention the return of inspections, changes to assessment and outside pressures like the cost-of-living crisis.
During the pandemic, school staff weren’t saying “no”, because they couldn’t. To an extent, that attitude has remained, and it’s doing a lot of damage.
There’s a tiredness in the profession that’s above and beyond anything that’s been there before – staff are low on emotional and physical resources.
For school leaders – those at the top making the decisions – the pressure is even more pronounced.
Education is a mission to prepare the next generation for the future, and if there are serious issues with fatigue and a lack of capacity right throughout the system then that mission is under threat.
It’s important that everyone in the system recognises there is a difference between being in a situation like a pandemic where you do everything you can to keep going and dealing with the aftermath of that.
We can’t act like it’s business as usual, because it’s not. We need to recognise that human capacity has a limit.
Schools have done as much as they realistically can to protect the wellbeing of staff. Now, action needs to be taken at a national level to address what is fast becoming the next epidemic.
We talk about some of these issues in more detail in this week’s podcast – listen here.
In the second part of this blog, we’ll take a research-informed view of the situation, identify some of the problems and look at some potential solutions.