Are teachers really more stressed than anyone else?

[EcoCalc]

Stumbled across a news article with a teacher who said the stress was so bad she considered crashing her car just so she didn’t have to go to work. Iots of people on my Facebook feed agreeing that that was their experience.

Maybe I just don’t get it but surely teachers don’t have the monopoly on stress. I always get the impression that they feel their jobs are much worse than anyone else’s. Is it more that the personality type attracted to teaching isn’t necessarily equipped for the same levels of stress that lawyers or doctors have?

Just curious about people’s thoughts. Is teaching the MOST stressful thing in the world as it is being depicted as being?

WofflingOn

On the brightside we were lucky that all of those failed bankers where happy to start teaching and bale us out :}

No one was upset by the non-materialising of hordes of bankers running to join the profession though

I think beerflavourednipples has it perfectly.

There have been/are several ex-soldiers teaching in my school

I’ve met one troops to teachers.

Nice guy. Pretty good teacher.

Not particularly muscly, not shouty or macho at all. Married.

Disappointment really 😃

Don’t forget the new wheeze is TAs to Teachers www.mumsnet.com/Talk/secondary/3469364-DfE-admits-teacher-supply-has-worsened-wants-TAs-to-become-teachers

This initiative, surely this one, will be the one to solve all our problems.

I think one reason teachers are a bit more vocal about the stress levels is because a lot of people still assume its a nice 9-3 job with 13 weeks holiday a year and that teenagers are as respectful as they were in the 1970s. Whereas those people simply accept that similar jobs such as nursing, police etc are hard and stressful, with long hours, shifts etc.
Ask the public and most of them will say nurses are angels who deserve a pay rise, while teachers are underworked and overpaid and a bit mean to poor Johnny when the dog ate his homework.

xmaspostman god I'd really hope people aren't that naive!

Not RTFT, just to say I'm a GP (often quoted as one of the most stressful professions), in a struggling practice. I'm going back to work soon after needing several months off work due to severe (psychiatrist- diagnosed) burnout.
I would not swap with a teacher. It sounds awful, and I am in awe of the fabulous teachers at DS's school who are so kind and patient with the children. for all of you wonderful people who are helping the next generation to develop a love of learning in spite of all the government interference, stress and difficulty.

Maybe not quite as naive as I made out, but honestly I think we wouldn't know how hard things have become if teachers didn't speak up about it.

The problem is when teachers speak up they are accused of being moaners,martyrs etc.

FruitCider

People are that naive. We are still having the discussions about being paid for holidays.

And I know exactly what my contract says about it.

I qualified 15 years ago. I took advantage of a natural break in contracts 2 years ago to focus on my family. I wasn't stressed to the hilt, but a large part of that was that I didn't feel trapped indefinitely. However, family life definitely suffered from DH and I both being stretched thin by our jobs. In my final year, I got to work to find my colleague being loaded into an ambulance with a suspected heart attack. It was a major panic attack/ mental breakdown. It felt like a purge where the mission was to be the person not currently being targeted for capability.

I went into the profession knowing it was hard work and would take a lot of out of hours work. It didn't disappoint The PGCE year was gruelling, but once I was an NQT, a lot of scruitiny was released and life got easier. I had some time doing casual supply, and that did a lot to boost my confidence and spontenaity. As a result planning became much easier and quicker. Marking was still quite flick and tick with appropriate comments. The main stress tended to be behaviour in schools where management weren't part of the team and were unsupportive.

Post-2010 was the game changer. It was this era where I had two maternity breaks. Special measures had been a source of fear for some years, but the removal of "adequate" and the increased threat of academy takeover upped the stress in so many schools. Budgets are barely existent and rash, rushed curriculum changes weren't resourced. NC levels were dropped, but there wasn't guidance about how to measure progress. Schools had weeks from the eventual release of new GCSE specs to select and prepare the courses for teaching in September and no budget for the textbooks that hadn't even been published because the specifications were so horrendously delayed.

The admin/ data crunching increased significantly in my final couple of years. In 2008, I could start work at 8 and leave at 6 with the majority of my planning and marking done in work. Maybe a bit more of my own time for assessments and reports, but largely I had an effective work/ life balance. In 2016, 3:05 to 5:35 was largely taken up with a greater number of meetings, joint planning, catch-up/ revision sessions, detailed seating plans with current data, work scruitinies, phoning parents, data analysis, emails and if I was lucky getting time to start double marking work with insightful praise and points for development. The rest of the planning and marking had to be crammed in later as my own DCs slept. One holiday, my marking was too heavy to carry to the car and I had to drop it and move the car to the marking. The car suspension visibly lowered! That didn't include the 50 GCSE books that were marked in school while I "treated" DS to "cinema day" of DVDs on my projector for 5 hours.

Everything is scruitinised including the marking rotas. Everything has to be justified. I found myself once resenting a class walking in because it was stopping me from doing a pile of other "essential" paperwork.

The progress targets are bullshit too. The primary schools have to teach to the test for their survival. You then get kids coming in with inflated grades in subject X which go into a formula that tells you that in 5 years they must get this grade in subject Y. Unfortunately life, interest, hormones and aptitude get in the way of that yet it all remains the teacher's fault.

Teaching certainly isn't alone in this culture of targets and accountability in the public or private sector. It is a pretty toxic addition though as so much is beyond the teacher's control. I became a teacher because I love my subject, love young people, it's creative and had a good balance of structure/ autonomy for me... I also wasn't attracted to sitting behind a desk doing paperwork. Oops!

Boneyback I think most people don't understand teachers contracts, eg your salary is for a fixed number of teaching hours, a fixed number of directed hours and an unfixed amount of hours to discharge your duties, with your annual salary divided over 12 months so it appears that you are paid for holidays. But as I recall 6/7 weeks a year are actually unpaid?

Oh no. A thread already speculating a out how teachers cant cope with pressures like real jobs has turned to holidays.
It was only a matter of time.

Huge portion of this site, Facebook, blogs etc centre around parents being stressed out. Majority of those have 2/3 children. Try dealing with 30 of them at once

FruitCider

My contract states that I am paid for 1265 hours.
No holiday pay is included.
And the money I am paid is split over twelve months.

I have yet -after asking many times- had anyone actually produce a contract for full time teachers in England that states anything about holidays.

I have seen several posters try to pass off Scottish contracts, civil servants contracts and other contracts. Yet they still deny the truth of it.

But then these are the people that post 9 till 3 working hours and rubbish about pensions that now longer exist.

Its difficult to tell whether they are convinced that they are right or are just goady fuckers.

MaisyPops

holidays have been mentioned through out the thread (including how little work X that I know brings home), but I hold my hands up to linking them to pay and conditions.

I'm a primary teacher. I went through a period in 2008-10 where I had those exact thoughts. I had to drive down a motorway to get to work. Everyday I prayed for a minor accident because the stress and bullying was too much.

I was stressed because I was regularly verbally and physically assaulted, threats were made against me, and there was no way to stop it happening. If you were bullied as a child, think about that happening on a regular basis with no hope of escape. It destroys you. I lived in fear. In any other job the culprits would have been sacked and the police would have been called. But teachers just have to put up and shut up.

Add on the fact that teachers get no respect and the pay is crap, and the longer they teach the more they’re at risk of being sacked because their salary goes up and they can be replaced with a cheaper NQT. In any other job experience is a asset not a detriment. The disrespect and lack of ability to earn a decent reliable salary destroys your self esteem. Most other high stress jobs have good salaries and respect.

That’s before you even consider the impact of long hours and lack of resources to do the job properly. Which, I admit, aren’t unique to teaching.

Fruitcider I took your bait and used both the MN search facility and Google to try to find the links you describe.

Found nothing. Nada.

Please do enlighten us with your superior googling skills.

I was a teacher for ten years in inner-city London schools. The stress was immense. I used to fantasise about jumping in front of a bus on the way to work. I attempted suicide in the end, completely work related. (I was told by my manager to cheat at GCSE coursework repeatedly, and was bullied when I refused). The relief when my GP wrote me off sick until the end of term was immense.
I'd never go back, and never recommend teaching to anyone. Not now.
It wasn't the young people, it was the management who made my life hell. I'm just about to retrain to work in a different capacity with teenagers and I can't wait.

Oh and I have two autistoc children. Life is intense with them. But I am not on my knees every day, I don't dread every single day.

Considering the number of posts that are made about parents struggling with their own children for two weeks/looking forward to school holidays ending, the stress that they are under from their children's behaviour, special needs, etc, I wonder whether the same parents always appreciate that those two lovely-but-annoying kids are then in a single room with 30 others and one person is then expected to inform,
educate,
entertain,
discipline,
make feel secure,
deal with disclosures about how Daddy hits Mummy or drinks himself stupid,
deal with ten kids with conflicting special needs that set one another off,
tears,
tantrums,
fights,
poverty,
children not fed properly,
kids that have learned from seeing how Daddy deals with Mummy that if you get your own way, you tell the other person how stupid, fat and ugly they are or punch them in the face,
kids who have learned words to describe the colour of other children in the class from their grandparents,
kids who already play Mum and Dad off one another using the same techniques to try and get 'fair' preferential treatment,
some who just want to learn and be happy -

and the natural instinct of many children to play up when they sense they have safety and strength in numbers.

In addition, over the years, they form attachments - they see the children every day, they know what they like, what scares them, how they feel about themselves or others. They might be in that child's life for longer than their father. They might be the one stable point in a child's life. They won't hit them. They won't spend their entire time on the phone or shouting at somebody else to keep them quiet. They might have to talk down a hulking 15 year old brandishing a knife, and then immediately go and teach a class where there are six kids who have issues with authority, medical diagnoses of conditions where they are explosively aggressive and wound up by the news somebody brought a knife into school, they might have to choose whether to put themselves physically between two teenagers who are the size and build of men or step back and hope help comes before one gets his face kicked in or a weapon comes out. (And then be informed by one of them that they're going to get them sorted out - knowing that the last time, it was Mum and boyfriend coming in, screaming the odds and that they Know People, or that an elder brother has gang connections and is probably due out of prison round about now)

When two children are fighting at home, it's horrible. Add in 300 others steaming around the site in packs taking sides, trying to stop you breaking it up because it's entertaining, trying to start satellite fights in support of the original dispute.

And at all times, the pressure is not to let the kids down, to get them all above average, FFS. Oh, and they've got to justify themselves to SLT and the parents. And Ofsted. And get the marking and lesson planning done. And cover other's lessons. Whilst being told they don't work a proper job and get a ton of holiday when they aren't actually paid for it and are probably in during most of it providing further free education to kids who didn't want to learn during lesson times until they finally realised they were going to fail if they didn't.

Yes, there are good things about teaching. But it is a different job to other high stress ones.

Spot on MitziK.