Why teaching is in the top three of most stressful occupations (and what can be done about it)

Teaching has frequently surfaced as one of the most stressful occupations in scientific studies and surveys. High stress levels seen in teachers not only put teachers' health at risk, but also negatively influence the quality of education schools can offer.

Let’s start off with a few numbers. Just because they are surprising and impressive at the same time.

• 93% of teachers report high stress levels at some point in their professional lives
• 7% of teachers consider themselves to be well-adjusted to their job
• teachers find their work stressful 61% of the time
• in comparison, the average in other working places is 30%
• 90% of the teachers have considered giving up their job because of high workload
• 87% of the teachers knows of colleagues who have quit their position
• 96% of the teacher find workload having negative consequences for their family or personal life
• 20% of the teachers in The Netherlands experienced burnout symptoms in 2014

These mind-boggling numbers have been found in studies in the UK, USA and The Netherlands, but likely apply to most, if not all, industrialized nations. Also, excessive stress seems to occur throughout all levels of the education system, from primary school to academia.

The percentage of teachers reporting high levels of perceived stress varies from study to study. This might be because of differences in defining what “high” stress levels and “considerable” stress are. Teachers are asked for example “How stressful is your job?”, or “How well are you coping with the stress of your job right now?” on scale from zero to ten. These are obviously very subjective measures of stress.

Nevertheless, with a range between 30 and 90 percent of the teachers experiencing high stress levels across studies, it is clear that mental health of many professionals working in our education systems is severely under pressure.

Indeed, the alarming stress numbers reported by teachers place teaching among the top three most stressful occupations, out of 80 occupations that were investigated in a study in the UK.

Causes of stress in the education system

Why are so many teachers under stress? Is this because of the teaching itself, being in front of a group of children or young adults to teach them things they don’t particularly want to learn? Or are there other factors that give rise to problems?

High workload and accountability

The most heard complaint is work overload. British statistics from 2013 show that the average primary teacher is working nearly 60 hours per week, a 10 percent increase since 2010. The additional working hours can be ascribed to increased demands of accountability. Teachers have been reported to have to take photographs of practical lessons just to prove that they were being done. Others have the experience of having to record all oral feedback given from students so that the school can prove to government-related institutions that  the quality of education is constantly monitored, and that the feedback has been recorded.

These examples illustrate an apparent lack of trust from inspection services or governments in teachers. This seems rather surprising, as teachers are professionals that have been well trained to provide children and young adults with the skills and knowledge to help them find their way in life. If you cannot trust professionals, who can you trust?

Continuous changes imposed by the government

More children per group, fewer children per group, more emphasis on group-based learning, more emphasis on the individual child, learning from books or learning where to find information yourself. These and similar changes are imposed by the government, so that teaching programs have to be changed constantly . This means lots of extra work for teachers, who have to compose new study material all the time.

On top of that, the imposed changes do not always improve learning capabilities of students and children, but seem to be motivated by allocated budget or new but insufficiently tested ideas.

The result: more pressure on teachers, accompanied by reduced motivation. This is a surefire combination to provoke stress.

Stress and beginning teachers

Research has shown that especially beginning teachers are more likely to experience stress. Beginning teachers seem to be more occupied by the high psychological demands that are inherent to teaching, and negative pupil behavior. Their negative emotions are related to teaching behaviors in terms of a safe and stimulating learning climate, efficient classroom management, clear instruction and activating learning.

In broader terms, there are five different causes of stress:

• high psychological task demands
• negative social aspects
• negative pupil aspects
• negative organizational aspects
• lack of development opportunities

The first three of those seem to be the most important among these five causes.

Causes of stress in teaching summarized

The causes of stress in teaching are manifold, some are external (accountability, imposed changes of learning methods), and others are internal (high psychological task demands, negative social and pupil aspects).

Consequences of stress among teachers

What are the effects of the massive amount of stress experienced by many teachers? There are two major consequences, one implicating the health of the stressed teachers, and one concerning the quality of teaching.

Consequences of stress for teachers’ health

As mentioned earlier in this article, one out of five teachers in The Netherlands suffered from burnout symptoms in 2014. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a burnout is “a syndrome that arises from unsuccessful management of chronic work-related stress”.

What this means is that because of chronic or repetitive stress during work (teaching), you will be feeling extremely tired, losing interest in your job, becoming more negative and cynical about your job, and you will be less and less effective in performing teaching.

Burnout takes a long time to recover from, anywhere from a few months to a few years. These long recovery times make burnout a major contributor to the total number of days of sick leave. Educational institutions experience the highest proportion of lost teaching days as a result of stress.

This is what makes stress so costly to health care systems. Treatments are long, and productivity is lost during this time.

While burnout appears to be the major health problem related to stress in teaching, other consequences for teachers’ health do occur and include cardiovascular problems, memory problems and depression. They are essentially the same as for stress experienced in any other profession, and are the result of biological and physiological changes in the body that occur during stress. For example, cardiovascular problems arise because of the actions of the stress hormone adrenaline. Depression can form because of changes in the brain. The functioning of certain brain cells will alter during stress or feelings of discontentment, for example by being disappointed not to be able to spend time with family and friends.

Consequences of stress for education quality

Studies have shown that pupils in the classroom of stressed teachers perform not as well as children who attend classes of teachers that are rather relaxed. Teachers reporting the highest levels of stress and the lowest levels of successful coping with stress are associated with the worst student outcomes. These outcomes include lower math scores and higher disruptive behaviors.

Indeed, teacher – pupil relationships really matter for learning. In one study, for example, it was found that teachers who reported higher levels of stress and burnout had students with higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol each morning. This biological measurement shows that classroom tensions, caused by a stressed teacher, are transmitted to his or her pupils.

Another consequence of stress on teaching is that stress, when leading to a burnout, leads to increased sick leave. This means that replacement teachers have to be found and prepared. On the one hand, this increases the workload of the remaining teachers, and on the other hand, this limits the possibilities of developing proper teacher – pupil relationships. These are not easy to establish if students see a different teacher all the time.

Finally, stress pushes teachers to leave their profession. A study published in 2015 showed that 76 percent of teachers in the UK are seriously considering leaving their job. This doesn’t mean that 76 percent of the teachers will actually leave. In America, the percentage of teachers quitting amounts to 8 percent per year. Still impressive. The main reasons teachers leave their profession include extreme amounts of oversight (inspection from governmental bodies), working conditions, stress, low salary and lack of respect. All these factors can lead to stress of course, so they all are related.

As with long sick leaves, new teachers have to be found and introduced to their new workplace, and children will find it more difficult to create a positive relationship with their teachers.

Solutions to reduce stress in teaching

What can be done to improve mental health of teachers and to avoid stress and burnout? Let’s have a look at several solutions that have been proposed.

Mindfulness

Can mindfulness help stressed teachers stay in the classroom? To answer this question, we would have to see first what mindfulness is about. Mindfulness is the psychological process of bringing one’s attention to the experiences occurring in the present moment. This can be achieved after meditation. The idea is that you will take emotional distance to the stressful situation, so that the stressful situation will not affect you so much.

While mindfulness might be helpful for some to reduce their stress levels, the working conditions will not change. The causes of stress in teaching will not have disappeared. Mindfulness will therefore not be the answer to reduce stress in teaching, but may help a stressed teacher to think more clearly about his or her stressful situation. This can then give a better perspective of how to deal with the causes of stress.

Reduce accountability

One obvious measure that can be taken to reduce stress in educational systems is to reduce the administrative overload that is the result of increased accountability by government bodies. This is not to say that accountability should be reduced to zero. After all, many schools are financed by public money, and we should know what is happening with this money coming from the taxpayers’ pockets. And certain rules should be obeyed, so that some external control seems warranted.

Nevertheless, the extreme amounts of oversight and accountability should be reduced. We should give trust to teachers, who are the professionals trained to educate our children. Give them back the control over their own schools, and stress will be reduced. Experiencing a lack of control is known to be an important stressor.

Also, why couldn’t inspection and teachers work together to improve the quality of our education system? Instead of controlling the work of teachers, inspection services could help teachers to improve, if necessary, work conditions, or help resolving problems should they arise.

Reduce political influence

Changing of the educational system for change’s sake from various governments should be avoided. Education should be run by professionals especially trained for that. These are the teachers.

This is not to say that politics should stay completely out of the organization of education. Changes in society can make it necessary that pupils need to learn skills that were not required previously. A prime example is the upcoming of computers and robots. Children would all need to be familiar with the digital world, and this makes it necessary that new educational material and programs are being implemented across the nation. The government could orchestrate this in collaboration with teachers’ representatives.

But other than that, governments should not impose changes to the education system, and let teachers work in a stable environment.

Invest in teachers - students relationships, especially for beginning teachers

As relationships with pupils are central to teaching, efforts to reduce stress should be directed towards the improvement of these relationships. Teachers could learn how to cope with pupil misbehavior, for example. Specific programs for the support of teacher-student relationships might be underrepresented. However, some countries (for instance The Netherlands) have already taken measures to improve this by implementing school-based and classroom-based social, emotional and behavior programs. The aim of these programs is to increase social skills and decrease antisocial, negative, behavior. This is especially relevant for beginning teachers.

Financial reward

Some experts say that increasing wages might help to attract and keep more teachers. While financial reward is important, low wages do not seem to be the biggest factor for most teachers to trigger stress. Studies in the US have shown that a modest increase of salary might be an incentive to work longer in low-performing schools. Low pay seems to be a stressor for only a group of teachers. 46 percent of teachers who participated in a US-based study said their salaries were a major source of stress in the workplace. However, this percentage positions financial stress below other sources of stress, which we already described earlier in this article.

Interestingly enough, many teachers in the US prefer to work in a private school, which typically offer much lower pay, but superior working conditions. One could probably say that, for many teachers, financial reward is important, but does not necessarily compensate for negative school culture and climate.

Conclusions

To reduce stress levels in our educational systems, we should let teachers do what they are passionate about, and what they have been trained for, and that is teaching. Less governmental control, better psychological support for beginning teachers, and more autonomy seem to be the best measures that can be taken to create a working atmosphere that fosters the capacities of teachers most.

Research has shown that autonomous teachers, who can control how they organize their work, show the lowest stress levels. This relates back to one of the main causes of stress: hierarchy and lack of control. Also, autonomous teacher benefitting from the support of school leaders and head teacher would show even lower stress levels. Giving teachers a sense of control is therefore the best guarantee to reduce stress, and elevate the quality of teaching.