We find little evidence that teachers have worse health and wellbeing outcomes than other occupational groups

How does the mental health and wellbeing of teachers compare to other professions? Evidence from eleven survey datasets. John Jerrim, Sam Sims, Hannah Taylor and Rebecca Allen. Review of Education, Vol. 8, No. 3, October 2020, pp. 659–689. DOI: 10.1002/rev3.3228

There is growing concern about the mental health and wellbeing of teachers globally, with the stress caused by the job thought to be a key factor driving many to leave the profession. It is often claimed that teachers have worse mental health and wellbeing outcomes than other occupational groups. Yet academic evidence on this matter remains limited, with some studies supporting this notion, while a handful of others do not. We contribute to this debate by providing the largest, most comprehensive analysis of differences in mental health and wellbeing between teachers and other professional workers to date. Drawing upon data from across 11 social surveys, we find little evidence that teachers have worse health and wellbeing outcomes than other occupational groups. Research in this area must now shift away from whether teachers are disproportionately affected by such issues towards strengthening the evidence on the likely drivers of mental ill-health within the education profession.

Keywords: mental health, occupational comparisons, teachers, wellbeing.

Conclusions

There is widespread global concern about the mental health and wellbeing of the teaching profession. Reports are now widespread in the international media about the stresses and strains of working as a teacher (Brennan & Henton, 2017; Asthana & Boycott-Owen, 2018), with particular pressure stemming from the long term-time working hours and due to the scrutiny teachers are placed under from high-stakes testing and school accountability. It has been suggested that this is a key reason why many individuals are deciding to leave teaching for alternative employment (CooperGibson Research, 2018), with a view that levels of stress, anxiety, depression and other aspects of poor wellbeing are not as prevalent amongst workers in other jobs. Several previous papers and research reports have suggested that mental health and wellbeing outcomes may indeed be worse amongst teachers than other professional groups (Travers & Cooper, 1993; Johnson et al., 2005; Ofsted, 2019; Worth & Van den Brande, 2019). At the same time, a handful of other studies have questioned whether this is really the case, presenting alternative empirical evidence to suggest that teachers have similar (and sometimes even better) wellbeing outcomes than professional employees in general. It hence remains an open question as to whether teachers are at a uniquely high-risk of suffering from low levels of wellbeing and of developing mental health problems.

Given the conflicts in the existing evidence base, this paper has sought to conduct the largest and most comprehensive analysis to date of the mental health and wellbeing of teachers in comparison to other professional groups. Drawing evidence from across 11 separate datasets, which together cover a wide array of mental health and wellbeing constructs and measures, the paper has presented detailed new evidence on this important policy issue. Our headline conclusion is that teachers actually seem to have very similar mental health and wellbeing outcomes to other professionals. There is little robust evidence to suggest that, on the whole, teachers are particularly anxious, depressed, have lower-levels of life-satisfaction or have poorer wellbeing outcomes than demographically similar individuals in other forms of professional employment. Although there are some exceptions amongst certain subgroups (e.g. SEN teachers tend to have somewhat lower levels of mental wellbeing, while the wellbeing of headteachers, on certain measures, is somewhat higher) and for certain outcomes (e.g. comparatively few teachers suffer from feelings of low self-worth) differences between teachers and other professionals are, on the whole, relatively small. These findings do, of course, need to be interpreted in light of the limitations of this study. First, although we have ‘matched’ teachers to demographically comparable professionals in other jobs, the number of potential confounders included within our matching models is a limitation. For instance, we have not been able to control for the wellbeing of study participants before they made their occupational choices. It could therefore be that those who choose to enter teaching start out with very high levels of wellbeing and mental health, which then rapidly decline to around the national average once they start working as a teacher. Such a situation would get masked within our analysis due to our lack of sufficient prior (pre-occupational selection) mental health and wellbeing controls. This is of course part of a much more general caveat that this paper has not been designed to measure the causal effect of choosing teaching as a career. Rather, we have presented a descriptive analysis attempting to establish whether mental health and wellbeing outcomes are worse amongst teachers than other professional groups—and not whether teaching leads to worse outcomes per se.

Second, and relatedly, one interpretation of our findings is that they are the result of individuals with mental health problems selecting out of teaching. For instance, those individuals who were working as teachers—but who struggled with their mental health and wellbeing—may have chosen to quit teaching for alternative employment. It is therefore possible that the teachers within our datasets are hence, on average, found to have similar outcomes to other professionals due to all those with mental health problems having chosen to leave. This again is an important caveat that needs to be remembered when interpreting our results—all the analyses are cross-sectional and are in reference to the population of individuals currently employed as teachers at the time of the surveys.

Third, to some extent all the data analysed in this paper are based upon information that has been self-reported by survey respondents. Although we have considered both responses to widely used and validated instruments and a selection of more objective outcome measures (e.g. prescription of anti-depressants) such indicators are not entirely free from such problems. Indeed, although the stigma attached to mental ill-health may be on the decline, it is possible that this leads some individuals to miss-report. While this issue is unlikely to undermine our substantive conclusions, future work using other measures (possibly including biomarkers and administrative primary care records) would help to strengthen the evidence base still further. Finally, some of the datasets we analysed included questions that asked specifically about wellbeing related to work, while others were about wellbeing and mental health in general. While there was no obvious difference in the pattern of the results, further research into occupational differences in work-related mental ill-health would be beneficial. For instance, the APMS dataset includes 15 questions specifically about work-related stress, which could provide a much more detailed insight into how this problem compares across occupations. Unfortunately, the sample size for each SOC group in the APMS is too small—and the occupational data made available too coarsely coded—to robustly investigate this issue. Our advice would be that at least a subset of these 15 work-related stress questions are asked within one of the UK’s large, flagship surveys (e.g. the LFS or APS) to facilitate such detailed occupational comparisons.

What then are the key directions for future work in this area? In our view, the evidence presented here makes it very hard to sustain the position that wellbeing and mental health outcomes of teachers are worse than for other occupational groups. For researchers in this area, the focus should now shift to better understanding the drivers of poor mental health outcomes amongst teachers, including whether these are indeed mainly work-related, or are actually mainly due to issues outside of their job (e.g. their personal life). Relatedly, we need better evidence on what system and school leaders can do to support their staff. There are, after all, a non-trivial number of school staff facing mental health issues, some of which may be caused or aggravated by their work. Understanding what can be done to help these individuals through this difficult period is key to teaching becoming a happier and healthier profession.