Ideas to support well being

[tortoise2022]

For those working in schools, what do your schools do to support good wellbeing for their teachers and staff in general? I have some ideas I want to put to SLT but I was wondering whether there's something going on elsewhere that I'd not thought of.

Thanks in advance!

I think anything like free fruit, yoga workshops and so on will wind as many people up as those who appreciate them.

To make a serious difference to wellbeing, it has to be something around workload. Whether that's looking at the marking policy, reducing the number of nights people have to stay late, cutting down on meetings, introducing a "no emails outside of work hours" culture, or something else, I don't know.

How about treating staff with respect and appreciating what they do. I agree that yoga classes and biscuits in the staff room are a waste of time if the basics are not in place.
Give feedback on what people are doing. Be appreciative of people's work and thank them for it.

These sort of threads get under my skin a bit because essentially you're asking strangers off the internet to suggest quick fixes to tick a box.

Really though, if you want to make staff happy you have to find out what makes them unhappy first and tackle that.

So find a format where people can be really, really honest and listen to them, then be prepared to make changes.

Sorry I didn't mean to aggravate anyone, it was a genuine question fuelled by a wish to try to make some useful suggestions to SLT. I've been unhappy for many years and my back is also put up by ideas such as yoga classes. I can't leave the profession yet so I've decided instead of complaining all the time, that I'm going to try to make some suggestions to make things better. Over the years I've found mumsnet to be a good source of ideas and information, I just thought there might be a school doing something, somewhere that's working!

I too get pissed off with the yoga and other bullshit suggestions. My school seriously thought the answer was to hold a staff sports club on a Friday after school!! 😳
How does more time in school (especially on a Friday) support well-being? 🙄
I would start with a survey which is actually anonymous.
What would help well-being in my school?
Get rid of excessive marking
Reduce learning walks
Less frequent data
Don’t make us attend unnecessary meetings in an attempt to make us ‘work our hours’ We already do far more anyway!
Back us up with behaviour and parents
Realistic expectations of pupil progress
Accept that our planning time is precious and use insurance money for absent colleagues to actually pay for cover rather than taking our PPA to cover for long term sickness.
Give us praise once in a while!

Ok here's a couple of things that have actually helped us.

replace (in the majority of cases) regular lesson observations with collaborative lesson studies. They're so much more fun, less stressful and you still end up with a good idea of the teaching and learning going on in most classes.

Scrap requirements to deep mark/quality mark books and replace this with "mark as you go" within the lesson as often as possible.

HT/DHT/SLT occasionally cover lessons in classes so that they know what they're like.

Being allowed to take PPA from home.

Not having a specific time requirement to stay in school after the kids have gone, if the work gets done it doesn't matter when or where.

The switch from written comments on work to Whole Class Feedback, and we no longer mark exercise books. Homework is now mostly done using an online, self-marking platform. Those changes to the marking and feedback policy have saved more hours than many other initiatives combined. I wouldn’t work anywhere that required written individual comments and book marking after experiencing the alternative. I think it’s more beneficial to the students too, they mostly ignored the written comments, and now feedback is verbal, or with a follow up task in lessons, they actually have to pay attention to the feedback.

We have a well being day off each year which is great