WELLBEING Groundhog Day in education: breaking
the cycle of poor staff wellbeing MARK SOLOMONS, founder of triple ERA Award-winning Welbee, an on-line evaluation and staff wellbeing improvement tool, and Edu Intelligence, the first AI tool delivering data analytics and recommended actions from combining stakeholder feedback and wider school data, discusses how to take action to truly prioritise wellbeing.
or statutory requirements. The best leaders don’t hide this. When something cannot be done, they explain why.
Data: the antidote to guesswork One of the most common mistakes I see in schools is leaders guessing what their staff need. You might think the biggest stressor is the marking policy, when actually it is the lack of support with challenging behaviour (a factor cited by 82% of staff in the 2025 Index as negatively affecting their wellbeing).
I
t feels like we have been here before. In fact, we have been here before. Every year, the Teacher Wellbeing Index tells us the same story: education staff are over-worked, under-valued, and burning out.
The 2025 report from Education Support is no exception. It makes for difficult, if unsurprising, reading. The figures are not just numbers on a page; they represent the lived experience of colleagues, friends, and the people we entrust with our children’s futures.
According to the latest Index, 77% of education staff have experienced symptoms of poor mental health due to their work this year. Even more alarmingly, over a third (36%) are at risk of probable clinical depression. These statistics have remained stubbornly high – and in some cases worsened – since the Index began. It is, quite literally, Groundhog Day. We are stuck in a loop of identifying the problem and then continuing with business as usual because the pressures of the day-to-day feel insurmountable. Add to this the perennial lack of certainty around funding and the ever-shifting goalposts of government policy, and it is easy to see why so many leaders are not able to make a real difference to these challenges. As we look toward 2026, we can accept that “this is just how it is,” or we can decide that next year must be different. We cannot control the funding we receive or the Department for Education’s latest directive. We can control the culture within our own trust or school gates. If we want to break the cycle of poor wellbeing, high stress and retention, we have to stop treating staff wellbeing as a “nice to have” or a bolt-on initiative.
The schools and trusts that are bucking this trend are those that have stopped looking for quick fixes and started building wellbeing into the
very fabric of their organisation.
I recently spoke to the Director of Wellbeing at ASSET Education, a trust based in Suffolk, and their approach offers one blueprint for what is possible when you take a “human-first” approach. They don’t just have a wellbeing policy; they have a “Complete Human Strategy.” This goes beyond staff to include students and parents and has made a significant improvement across all key measures.
This isn’t about soft skills; it is about hard strategy. It acknowledges that you cannot have high educational outcomes without high staff wellbeing. They are two sides of the same coin.
Lessons from the frontline
So, what are ASSET Education and those trusts and schools that are bucking the trend doing differently? It comes down to systemic changes that value the individual. Here are some of the practical approaches they are employing: • Dedicated wellbeing leads: Rather than adding “wellbeing” to the bottom of a Deputy Head’s already overflowing job description, they have dedicated leads, with authority, in every school.
• Regular check-ins: They don’t wait for a crisis to ask staff how they are. They utilise half termly check-ins based on clear pillars of wellbeing. This allows them to catch issues early—identifying a wobble before it becomes a fall.
• Co-created Charters: Instead of imposing rules from the top down, staff co-create “Charters” that define “how we do things here.” This builds a sense of agency and ownership.
• Explaining the “why”: This is crucial. In education, we are often forced to make unpopular decisions due to budget constraints
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www.education-today.co.uk
You cannot fix what you do not measure. To make 2026 different, you need to know exactly what is happening on the ground in your setting. This means moving beyond an annual survey or tick-box exercises that many dread and do not trust. You need: • Anonymous, external measurement: Staff need to feel safe to say what they really think without fear of reprisal.
• Actionable insights: Data is useless if it sits on a shelf. You need to know specifically which drivers—whether it’s workload, behaviour support, or line management quality—are causing the most friction. And be given a helping hand with the best actions to take.
• The “You Said, We Did” loop: Nothing destroys morale faster than asking for feedback and ignoring it. You must demonstrate that you have heard them. And if you can’t fix a specific issue immediately? See the point above: say, “You said X, we can’t do that right now because of Y, but here is what we are doing instead.”
Changing the narrative
We continue to face retention challenges that threaten the stability of our education system. The Teacher Wellbeing Index shows us that half of all staff feel their organisational culture has a negative impact on their mental health. While this is a difficult read, it is also an opportunity. If culture is the problem, then culture is also the solution. Changing culture costs nothing financially. It costs time, attention, and a willingness to be vulnerable. It requires leaders to be rigorous about protecting their staff’s time. It requires a relentless focus on making sure staff feel safe and supported.
As we plan for 2026, make your resolution to stop accepting the “Groundhog Day” of poor wellbeing statistics and take different actions that finally bring the changes we would all like to see.
For further information and practical advice, visit: u
https://welbee.co.uk
January 2026
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