The COVID pandemic has intensified existing issues in the education sector across the UK. Prior to this, headteachers already faced challenges with resources and workload. Now, they must also deal with the long-term disruptions caused by COVID, which have had significant effects on the education system, schools, and students. Recent research has shown that during the pandemic’s peak, headteachers commonly experienced low wellbeing, depressive symptoms, high stress related to work, and both physical and mental exhaustion. Even before COVID’s emergence in early 2020, educators expressed concerns about workload, wellbeing, and recruitment and retention issues. Experts had been discussing the potential crisis in educational leadership due to increasing demands on headteachers for years.
COVID has been declared by Unesco as the most significant disruption in formal education history. Data indicates over 1.6 billion students and 100 million teachers globally were affected. Headteachers had to create, implement, and manage unprecedented roles and responsibilities. These decisions impacted their lives and those of their colleagues, students, families, and communities. Initially, researchers examined the pandemic’s effects on students and teachers, including in early years and higher education settings, but overlooked the impact on headteachers in terms of wellbeing and work-related stress. To fill this gap, we surveyed more than 320 headteachers in Wales and Northern Ireland as part of a broader international study conducted in 17 countries. We aimed to assess COVID’s impact on headteachers and investigate whether men and women experienced these challenges differently.
Our findings in Wales and Northern Ireland were notable. Most headteachers reported increased workloads compared to pre-pandemic times, working at least 50 hours weekly. This was coupled with elevated work-related stress levels. Overburdening workload and stress have driven headteachers out of the profession, exacerbating during the first two years of the pandemic. Sixty-three percent of headteachers we studied reported often compromising sleep, and 75 percent frequently sacrificed leisure activities for work. Such behaviors, though necessary to meet job demands, are detrimental to health and wellbeing, especially self-endangering behavior. Female leaders in our study were likelier to report these issues due to high workloads.
About 65 percent of headteachers reported low wellbeing, lower than the general UK adult population. Additionally, 35 percent reported depressive symptoms. These issues transcend headteachers, as research links teacher wellbeing with student health, wellbeing, and academic achievement. Increased workload and self-endangering behavior can result in burnout, a psychological condition caused by chronic job stress. Exhaustion, a key burnout symptom, affected nearly 90 percent of headteachers in our study, particularly women, who also reported physical symptoms like headaches or muscle pain. Further research points to societal gender norms as exacerbating factors, owing to the pressure of balancing work with responsibilities such as childcare and elder care.
Despite significant work-related challenges noted by headteachers, they still found their work meaningful, suggesting a steadfast sense of social responsibility. This needs to be matched with adequate support and investment from policymakers, especially in the evolving “new normal” for education. The assumption of a quick societal recovery post-pandemic has proven incorrect. Recently, headteachers in Wales and Northern Ireland have engaged in industrial actions, citing overwhelming workloads, pay increases below inflation, and chronic underfunding of schools. These pressures are mirrored throughout the UK. Our study adds to the extensive evidence on challenges faced by headteachers, exacerbated by the pandemic and ongoing educational difficulties, such as a decade of budget constraints, declining Pisa scores (which assess countries on student performance in math, reading, and science), and persistent educational inequality.
Beyond the immediate pressures of managing schools during the initial two years of COVID, headteachers are also tasked with implementing systemic changes. Major educational reforms are ongoing or have recently been completed across all four UK nations.