NASUWT: Leaders need better training on mental health issues
Headteachers should receive specific training in mental health issues to raise awareness of the problems that can be created by poor leadership, a teaching union has said.
Delegates attending the NASUWT annual conference in Birmingham during the Easter break voted in favour of a motion calling for employers to be given training to better understand the consequences of the decisions and actions they take in schools.
The conference heard that there were 139 known suicides among teachers between 2011 and 2015 and that a “pandemic” of mental health problems has swept the profession.
According to research figures released by NASUWT, three in 10 teachers admitted using medication to get through their working day, while more than seven out of 10 said that they had experienced anxiety.
Russ Walters, an NASUWT executive member, told the conference: “We will not allow employers to continue to get away with it. There can be no doubt that the workload agenda is the biggest cause of mental health problems among our members. Where members say enough is enough and threaten strike action, their mental health improves.
“We call on the executive to increase provision of the union’s mental health training programme to include specific training for school leaders. Let’s get to our school leaders, as they are the ones making the decisions – let’s give them best practice guides and exemplar material for employers.”
Daniel Perriman, a teacher from Northampton, described how he suffered a pulmonary embolism while driving home from school because of the stress of the job.
“Think – in the 21st century we have to tell our employers that they have a care of duty towards us. They are supposed to be protecting us. We have a human right to be safe at work.
“Academies want to be seen as businesses so why don’t we treat them as businesses. Such statistics (on mental health problems among teachers) in a shoe factory in Northampton would see it closed down. We need to hold our employers to account.”
Gwerfyl White, a teacher from Surrey, had to supported on the podium by delegates after she broke down in tears when mentioning a colleague who had recently died at the age of 38. Ms White did not elaborate on how her friend had died but said: “The culture in schools must change.”
“Teaching is a vocation. Healthy teachers mean healthy learners. But because we care we are our own worst enemies. We could say ‘no’, but we don’t. We put pupils before ourselves and our own health.”
Elaine Paling, a teacher from Oxford and a trained mental health first-aider, said she had been asked to deliver a course called Surviving Excessive Stress, on a local SCITT course: “I do it because I want to help, but if we are putting this into the SCITT curriculum and highlighting the fact you are going to experience excessive stress, I think that is wrong, she said. “It’s not natural in a working environment.”
Claire Taylor, a teacher from Durham, described how she was saved by specialist mental health services after taking an overdose at her desk four years ago. She said: “We need more therapists and counsellors. I’m the lucky one. I got help and the right medication and cognitive behavioural therapy. But we don’t have that across the country. Think of yourself as a person first and not just as a teacher.”
NEU-ATL: Is education contributing to rise in teenage suicide rate?
The role that education is playing in cases of suicide among teenagers needs to be urgently assessed, a conference has been told.
“Youth suicide is a barometer, like the canary in the miner’s cage whose death signals a greater doom,” said Robin Bevan, a secondary teacher from Essex, speaking at the ATL section of the National Education Union (NEU) annual conference in Liverpool last week. “Rates in UK are internationally relatively low, but they are rising, and they are rising fast.”
According to 2017 data from the Office for National Statistics, 231 people aged 10 to 19 took their own lives in 2015 – the highest number for 14 years.
A motion at the conference stated that each case was “a complex personal tragedy” in which schools were “only ever part of the narrative”, but questioned whether “the curriculum content, the assessment framework, approaches to pedagogy, and other pervasive aspects” of the education system were contributing to a “lived experience of hopelessness” for pupils.
“Youth suicides increase when the cultural and social narrative of hope declines, and fundamentally this turns on a simple question: do you believe that the future will be better than the past?” Mr Bevan continued.
“I take that question, and I ask you whether that is the outlook that is fostered in every classroom, in every school, and every college.”
He said that national leaders had “abandoned any narrative of hope, exchanging it for a politically motivated dialogue of fear ... (and) a socially punitive economic framework”.
In a survey of 730 education staff, carried out by the NEU and published at the conference, 49 per cent said they believe some secondary pupils have been suicidal because of the stress they are under; 82 per cent said tests and exams have the biggest impact on the pupil mental health. Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the NEU, said it was shocking that so many children were suffering to the point of contemplating suicide: “The constant pressure for pupils to reach impossible standards, and the constant tinkering with the curriculum, leaves them feeling demoralised and disillusioned by education.”
Delegates passed the motion, which urged the union to assess education provision in all schools and colleges, looking at whether the experience for learners is one that fosters hope for the future.
NEU-NUT: ‘Exam factory’ impact on mental health under spotlight
Teachers have spoken out against the strain that the “exam factory approach” to secondary education is putting on children and young people’s mental health.
In a motion debated at the annual conference of the NUT section of the National Education Union (NEU), delegates heard how the government’s new “knowledge-rich curriculum” was reducing education to a narrow set of checklists, and that the pressure for students to receive unrealistic targets was contributing to a student “mental health crisis”.
Emma Mort, a language teacher in Warwickshire, described how her year 11 German class “sometimes look at me as if I am the worst teacher in the world”.
“I must be,” she continued. “Because in the mock that they did back in December, vast swathes of that paper they couldn’t do.
“It was inaccessible to them, it was just too difficult.”
She explained to students that the new “world class” exams were designed to be more challenging and stretching. Unsurprisingly, she added, this did not reassure them.
“Pupils don’t feel world class when they are writing (notes to me) on their exam papers (for when) I am marking them afterwards – ‘I am so sorry Emma I am really stupid’; ‘I am so sorry Emma, I just can’t do this’. They don’t feel word class at that moment,” she said.
“Students across the country who are self-harming as a direct result of the pressure they are being put under to achieve – they don’t feel world class either.”
Vendathal Premkumar, a teacher in Redbridge, east London, described the student mental health “pandemic” as “shocking”.
“They’ll be left with scars and anxieties for the rest of their lives,” she added, describing the new GCSEs as a “soulless … dystopian version of education”.
The motion, which said that all children had the right to a “broad and balanced curriculum”, claimed that the current secondary curriculum was “alienating large numbers of children”.
It called on the union to build a major conference on curriculum and pedagogy as part of a wider effort to challenge the government’s vision of education.
In a separate motion, calling for the introduction of a more child-centred curriculum, Michael Dance, an English teacher in Redbridge said that year 11 “now resembled year 6 in the way that the whole year is given over to repeating and repeating and repeating exam questions so that the school can be secure about the core subject results”.
Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the NEU, said: “Teachers frequently speak of the despair they feel about the consequences that this testing and accountability culture is having.
“The exam factory approach to education is squeezing the joy out of teaching and learning and impacting on the wellbeing and mental health of students.”
NEU-NUT: Teachers resist ‘resilience’ approach to beating stress
The mental health crisis among school staff is escalating because teachers are being told that the best way to combat stress in the workplace is through “resilience training”.
In a fringe meeting on mental health held at the annual conference of the NUT section of the National Education Union (NEU), delegates were told to “resist resilience” and make sure that more practical steps were taken including the election of a school health and safety rep.
“Resilience argues that workplace productivity gets improved by making your staff more resilient to stress – and there is a whole industry now based around this,” Corinne Lamoureux, a teacher in Cornwall and a member of the NEU-NUT National Health and Safety Working Group, told delegates in Brighton.
“This makes it … your individual problem (that) you are not coping with the stress of your job.”
She said schools were buying into quick-fix solutions, such as wellbeing training or positive psychology courses, instead of addressing the root causes of stress and poor staff mental health.
“I kid you not, I was sent on an INSET day training course on ‘laughology’,” she said. “If you’re crying because you’re working 60 hours-a-week and you are not having time with your family, don’t worry about it – flip it, have a laugh about it.”
Ms Lamoureux added that while such courses could be useful if offered in addition to good workplace practices, they should “not be used as a substitute” for schools meeting their legal responsibilities.
According to the Office for National Statistics, there were 139 suicides among teaching and educational professionals between 2011 and 2015, and a 2017 survey by the Education Support Partnership, a charity offering counselling and support to teachers, found that 75 per cent of teachers suffered either physically or mentally because of their jobs.
Nicola Scope, a former mental health nurse who now works as a supply teacher in secondary schools in Derby, told SecEd that changes in the profession, such as the introduction of performance-related pay and the introduction of the new secondary curriculum, had worsened conditions.
“The culture in the classroom is causing both children and the adults that work there to suffer from mental health problems – definitely,” she said.
In his address to members, Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the NEU, said that “teachers in England are reported as having among the highest levels of stress of any profession”, which was contributing to “an unprecedented teacher recruitment and retention crisis”.
He added: “Many teachers now say that they don’t encourage their own children to take up the profession.”