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12 Ways to Look After Your Wellbeing as a Teacher

Writer: Kate O'Leary
Kate O'Leary
Sep 10
9 min read

Updated: Oct 1

Practical ideas and free UK support for teachers and school staff, without it feeling like yet another thing on the to-do list.


Two yellow stressed-face emoji stress balls held up in front of a blurred slide titled Stress and a laptop.

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 boundary between work and the rest of your life. The line between work and home can get very blurry in education. Emails arrive in the evening, planning spills into Sundays and school holidays can quietly become catch-up time. You might not be able to change all of that on your own, but one small boundary could help you hold onto a little time that’s actually yours. That could mean allowing the drive home to be a pause, taking ten minutes before the laptop opens again, turning off work notifications after a certain time or keeping one evening laptop-free. Ten minutes you actually take is better than an hour you keep meaning to.

Let’s not pretend a few boundaries can make an unmanageable workload disappear. Schools have a massive part to play in making those boundaries possible too. Clear expectations from leadership around out-of-hours messages and weekend or holiday work can make it easier for everybody to switch off.

If a whole evening feels completely out of reach at the moment, Education Support has a short How to re-charge in 3 minutes or less reflection exercise might help you find a smaller, more realistic way 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. 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.


7. Find out what your Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) actually offers. A lot of schools have an EAP, sometimes they offer a fixed number of free, 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.


8. Remember that supporting other people can affect you too. Caring about pupils and colleagues can be one of the most meaningful parts of working in a school, but it can also weigh on your own wellbeing. You might leave work replaying a conversation, wondering whether you said the right thing or feeling responsible for doing more. It's something I notice again and again on my Mental Health First Aid courses, just how much people care, and how unsure they can feel about what to say or where to point someone next. So I want to remind you that you don’t need to diagnose someone, or try to fix it yourself. It's enough to notice that someone doesn’t seem like themselves, ask them how they are and listen to their reply without judgement, that's a more than helpful place to start. Recognising that this is emotional work may help you make sense of why some days stay with you long after you’ve left school.


9. Ask for mental health training, with protected time to attend it. Worry can be much harder to put down when you’re not sure what should happen next. It might help to find out who you can approach if you’re concerned about a pupil, a colleague or your own wellbeing, and what kind of support they can offer. Mental health awareness or mental health first aid training can help you feel more prepared and more confident starting a conversation, understand what is and isn’t yours to carry, and know when and where to sign-post a concern on. It isn’t about turning school staff into therapists, and it shouldn’t become another demand on your own time. If your school offers training, asking for it to happen during an INSET day or within working hours could make it feel like genuine support rather than one more thing to fit in. Having a clearer route for getting support or passing something on can really ease some of the pressure to work it all out yourself.


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. 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. It helps if you agree clear boundaries at the beginning, including what stays within the group and how any safeguarding or safety concerns would be handled. If your school is interested in setting something up more formally, Anna Freud offers training in reflective practice and staff peer supervision.



11. 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.


12. 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 all the answers before you start the conversation.



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 and resources for teachers and school staff in the UK




Kate O'Leary

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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