12 Ways to Look After Your Wellbeing as a Teacher
Updated: 3 days ago
Practical ideas and free UK support for teachers and school staff, without it feeling like yet another thing on the to-do list.
School staff are under an awful lot of pressure.
Most teachers find themselves carrying far more than the job description ever mentioned. A safeguarding worry that follows you home. A mental health disclosure five minutes before a lesson. A referral that comes back because a child doesn't quite meet the threshold.
If you're feeling it, you're not imagining it
Research can never tell the whole story of what it feels like to work in a school. But it can sometimes help to make sense of why you might be feeling the way you do.
In the DfE’s 2025 Working Lives survey, 57% of the teachers and school leaders who answered its wellbeing questions said their job was negatively affecting their mental health. So, if the job has been following you home, taking over your evenings or leaving you with very little left in the tank, you’re far from alone.
Education Support is a UK charity dedicated to supporting the mental health and wellbeing of teachers and education staff. Its 2025 Teacher Wellbeing Index found that 87% of staff provided pupils with emotional support at least once a month. Their report also found staff were providing food and buying school supplies for pupils with their own money, highlighting just how far the job can stretch beyond education.
There's a reason so much of it is landing on teachers and on schools. Part of the wider context is the growing level of need among children and young people at the moment. The NHS’s latest national survey found that around one in five 8-16-year-olds in England had a 'probable mental health condition'. And more than 385,000 children and young people were still waiting for a first contact with community mental health services in the three months to March 2025. Many of those children will still have continued spending much of their week in school every day, and it's often school staff who are the steady adult beside them while they wait.
Being that steady adult can be a meaningful part of the work. It can also mean carrying an enormous amount of emotional responsibility alongside everything else the job already involves.
Pupil and staff wellbeing aren’t competing priorities. They’re closely connected, but staff wellbeing matters in its own right too, not only because of what it might mean for pupils.
Supporting staff wellbeing can’t all come down to asking already stretched people to do more to look after themselves. Realistically, some of that pressure sits outside any one person’s control. There are small steps that might offer some temporary relief, but honestly, they can’t replace manageable workloads, adequate staffing or properly resourced services.
The ideas below aren’t intended to become twelve more things on an already-too-long to-do list. They’re some simple ideas that might help you look after yourself, feel a little less alone or find some extra support. Take what feels useful and leave the rest.
12 ways to look after your wellbeing as a teacher
1. Get to know your own early warning signs. School staff often get really good at noticing when a young person seems a bit off, sometimes before they’ve said anything at all. It can be so much harder to spot when something is shifting in ourselves, especially when we’re used to just getting on with it. Taking a moment every now and then to check in with yourself can help. What does tired-but-fine look like for you, and what does running-on-empty look like? Maybe you’re snappier than usual, sleeping badly or dreading Sunday evening. If you're not sure, someone who lives with you almost certainly is.
2. Protect one small pocket of recovery. The drive home, ten minutes before the laptop opens again, the first hour of the weekend. A whole restful evening, if you can get it. Ten minutes you actually take is better than an hour you keep meaning to. If you’re not sure what your own small pocket of recovery could look like, Education Support has a short How to re-charge in 3 minutes or less reflection exercise to help you identify quick, realistic ways to pause and recharge during the day.
3. Find somewhere to put it down. As a counsellor I'm required to have supervision, and I'd struggle without it. Talking about how difficult experiences have affected you can sometimes help them feel less stuck. You may not have professional supervision available to you, but you can still have the conversation. You might choose a trusted colleague, a friend outside education or a quiet walk where you say the feeling out loud, while still keeping any identifying or confidential details private.
4. Look into professional supervision if you can get it. Education Support offers a fully funded professional supervision programme for eligible school and college leaders. Six online sessions with a qualified supervisor who understands education. It’s worth checking whether places are currently open because availability and eligibility can vary. There may also be a wider conversation worth having about access to reflective support for classroom and support staff, because teaching assistants, ECTs and classroom teachers handle plenty of the same material. If you’d like to understand a little more about what professional supervision is and how it could help, I really enjoyed this episode of NAHT’s School Leadership Podcast, where James Bowen speaks to Faye McGuinness from Education Support.
5. Keep an eye on how connected you feel. Schools are full of people, and it's still very possible to feel alone in them, especially if there’s nobody else in the building doing quite the same job as you. Education Support has a good free guide on loneliness for teachers and education staff if that rings any bells.
6. Find out what your Employee Assistance Programme actually offers. A lot of schools have an EAP, which might include a fixed number of free, confidential counselling sessions, as well as other forms of practical and emotional support. It’s easy to forget it’s there until you really need it, so it could be worth finding out how to access yours and saving the details somewhere easy to find. Your business manager or HR lead should be able to point you in the right direction, and you could always share what you find with colleagues who might not know it’s available.
7. Know what's available before you need it. Education Support runs a free, confidential helpline for anyone working in education, 24 hours a day: 08000 562 561. Worth putting in your phone, even if things are calm at the moment. It's also worth having a scroll around their website and maybe even signing up to their mailing list. They have some amazing articles, videos and guides to help with mental health and wellbeing.
8. Recognise the confidence gap for what it is. The thing I hear most often on courses is that people care so much and still feel unsure when it comes to mental health and wellbeing. Unsure whether what they're seeing is a problem or not. Unsure what to say. Unsure where to point someone next. That may point to a gap in confidence or training, and supportive training can really help where that's concerned. It's very fixable. In the meantime, noticing, listening without judgement and passing it on to the right person is a complete and valuable response.
9. Ask for mental health training, with the time to attend it. Training can be one practical response to the confidence gap, and it works for spotting when a colleague is struggling as much as a pupil. Most training is available online, so the sticking point is usually time, and finding it on top of everything else. Schools that build it into an INSET day take that off staff entirely, and it says a lot about how seriously they're taking wellbeing.
10. Consider starting a peer supervision group with colleagues. A small group meeting regularly, with protected time, can offer somewhere to reflect on the emotional impact of the work, think things through together and feel less alone. It helps to agree clear boundaries at the beginning, including what stays within the group and how any safeguarding or safety concerns would be handled. Peer supervision is different from formal professional supervision, but it can still give staff somewhere to pause, process what they’re carrying and support one another. If your school is interested in setting something up more formally, Anna Freud offers training in reflective practice and staff peer supervision.
11. Let someone know if it’s all getting a bit too much. When everyone around you seems stretched too, it can be easy to keep going and tell yourself you just need to push through. But you don’t have to wait until you’ve got nothing left in the tank to say that something isn’t manageable. If there’s someone at work you trust, perhaps a line manager, union rep or colleague, it might help to talk through what could wait, be shared or be taken off your plate. You don’t need to have the answer before you start the conversation.
12. Find out what your school has committed to around staff wellbeing. The Education Staff Wellbeing Charter is a set of commitments to protect and support the mental health and wellbeing of staff in state-funded schools and colleges in England. If your school has signed it, knowing what it has committed to might help you discover support you didn’t know was available, or make it a bit easier to start a conversation about what would help. Even if it hasn’t, the Charter could give you some helpful language for talking about wellbeing and workload at work.
Where to start
Some of these take five minutes. Some need a conversation with someone else. All of them are a start.
If you only pick one thing off this list, start with number one, because everything else gets easier once you can spot what's happening in yourself early 💚
If anything in this article has resonated with you, there is support available.
Free support for teachers and school staff in the UK
Education Support runs a free, confidential helpline for anyone working in education, 24 hours a day: 08000 562 561 as well as lots of free articles, videos and guides
The DfE's Improve Workload and Wellbeing for School Staff service has free tools made by school leaders, for school leaders
Education Support's guide to loneliness for teachers and education staff
NAHT’s School Leadership Podcast shares thoughtful conversations about the issues affecting school leaders, including staff wellbeing, workload, school culture and inspection
If cost is the barrier to counselling, my post on 10 Ways to Find Free or Cheap Counselling in the UK has more options
The free Funding Staff Wellbeing on a School Budget guide from Schools UK Health is aimed at school business managers, HR leads and senior leaders, with a checklist to help compare different kinds of staff support
If you'd like to talk about mental health training for your staff team this year, or you'd rather talk something through one to one, do get in touch.
Written by Kate O’Leary
Person-Centred Counsellor & MHFA England Instructor
Kate is a counsellor, mental health trainer and founder of Wellbeing First Aid.
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