Written by Christopher Hein
I used to be a teacher. Working long hours after class ended or getting up early in the morning before school to prepare lessons, mark exams and tests or various other tasks, was the norm. And I quit to get my life back, even though I really enjoyed being in the classroom and seeing my students learn from me. Stories like mine are becoming more frequent in the UK media as the current government is implementing quite radical changes, as teachers and their unions claim they are being over-worked and are likely to quit. My story happened in Germany, which shows that the UK is not alone. But I wondered, is my story, and what the media is reporting, just people’s perception or does teachers’ well-being really depend on their workload?
After I quit, I went back to University to get a PhD. I was lucky to be studying at UCL in London, where the Institute of Education was the UK partner of the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2013. This survey was conducted in 32 education systems around the world, including England, and my supervisor happened to be involved in this project. TALIS 2013 surveyed both teachers and their school leaders on the teaching and learning process and contained, among many others, questions relating to teachers’ subjective well-being and their weekly workload in general and also how much time they tend to spend per week on a number of tasks. This was ideal for me to investigate my question, and I could do so not only using data from one country, but I could compare my findings across all countries to see if it really is a more general phenomenon.
Interestingly, my research question had never been explored in educational settings. Only two studies existed that used outdated samples of the general working population in the US and a bunch of European countries. They didn’t find any relationship between well-being and people’s workloads, but their results averaged across this very heterogeneous sample. If they had just sampled teachers the results may have been different.
So I set to work. According to the literature, the main challenge I had to try and overcome was that there may be other factors that both affect teachers’ subjective wellbeing as well as how many hours they work in total as well as on different tasks. Luckily the TALIS data is very rich and covers many important aspects such as:
1. Whether or not a teacher works full time
2. Whether they are on a permanent contract
3. Whether they are involved in mentoring
4. Their gender
5. How competent the teacher feels in the classroom
6. The degree to which the teacher cooperates with his or her colleagues
7. The teacher’s age to approximate seniority
Finally, the structure of the TALIS data allowed me to remove the potential effect of the school each sampled teacher is in completely.
The findings were really surprising in three ways. First of all, there is no consistent association of teachers’ workload and their well-being at work, neither if you consider their total workload nor the amount of time they spend working on different tasks, such as teaching in the classroom, lesson planning, marking, school leadership and administrative tasks. Secondly, in most cases there is no statistically significant association. And finally, the estimated effect sizes are negligible.
I then turned my attention to the English data. Additional data was collected with this sample, specifically asking teachers how they felt about aspects of their school. As my previous analysis had been able to remove the potential effect of the ‘real’ aspects of each teacher’s school, perhaps it was their personal perception of their school and their job in general that played a role and were ‘messing up’ my results? So I re-ran my analysis for the English sample and included thirteen variables indicating whether or not the teachers agreed with the following questions:
1. The students I teach are generally well behaved.
2. The school has an effective school management team.
3. The school management team gives clear vision and direction.
4. I do not have the autonomy I need to do a good job as a teacher.
5. Teachers are underpaid compared to other qualified professionals with similar levels of responsibility.
6. My own pay is fair given my performance.
7. The accountability system (Ofsted, league tables, etc.) does not add significantly to the pressure of my job.
8. Parents are supportive of my role as their children’s teacher.
9. The accountability system does not add significantly to my workload.
10. I have scope to progress as a classroom teacher.
11. I have scope to progress into a leadership role.
12. I have scope to progress to a higher pay level.
13. My workload is unmanageable.
Again my findings were not what I expected. Including these variables didn’t make a difference to the previous results. But I did find that most of these thirteen variables are strongly associated with teachers’ well-being at work. The findings revealed that teachers appear to value well-behaved pupils the most, followed by having sufficient autonomy to do their job, having the scope to progress as a teacher, as well as an effective school-leadership team.
Although research into teachers’ well-being at work is still in its infancy, these findings open up a new avenue of research. Hopefully we will soon have a much better understanding and ‘hard’ statistical evidence we can present to policy makers and, with a bit of luck, improve schools as workplaces.
To read the full research, please click here. It is the third chapter of my thesis, which starts on page 93.