WELLBEING The six-week assumption
In his regular column this month for Education Today MARK SOLOMONS, founder of triple ERA Award- winning Welbee, and Edu Intelligence – the first AI tool that connects stakeholder feedback, documents and wider school data, and most importantly, makes sense of it for schools, groups and trusts – discusses why the summer break doesn’t automatically fix what the year has broken, and what leaders can do about it.
end-of-year administrative load to what is genuinely necessary. If a task can wait until September, it should wait.
Announce explicitly what your expectations around email will be over summer – not as a line in a policy, but as a personal commitment: what you will not send, and when the first genuine expectation of contact is. And have honest end-of-year conversations with your teams. Not a speech at a leavers’ assembly, but direct acknowledgements of what was hard this year. Staff who feel seen going into the summer carry less unprocessed weight into it. Over summer, the single most impactful thing many leaders can do is avoid non- essential contact. The arrival of a school email on a day in August, however well-intentioned, pulls people back. It signals that work has not really ended. Many leaders make a public commitment to a summer email period, a defined window within which they will not initiate contact.
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here is a public assumption built into the school year: however difficult the year has been, the summer will restore staff. They will return in September refreshed and ready to go again. For some, that is true. For a growing number, it is not.
The gap between what we believe summer does and what it actually does is becoming one of the more significant blind spots in how schools approach staff wellbeing. Leaders who understand what six weeks can and cannot repair will make different decisions before the term ends, in August and in the first days of September. Those decisions will shape the wellbeing of their teams far more than most of what happens in between.
What’s required for recovery? Recovery from sustained stress is not the same thing as rest. Research on occupational burnout consistently points to the importance of psychological detachment – the ability to genuinely stop thinking about work, to separate from it mentally as well as physically. For teachers managing such things as live safeguarding concerns, unresolved SEND reviews, or a student they are deeply worried about, that separation is hard to achieve. The financial picture makes this even harder. With the cost of living continuing to challenge household budgets, a significant number of teachers take on paid work over summer – tutoring and other seasonal work. Others use the break to deal with the life administration that the term swallowed whole.
Neither is recovery in any meaningful sense. July/August 2026
And then there is the planning. How many staff will spend significant portions of August preparing for September? For many, summer is not a question of whether to work, but how much.
The result, for a profession that has just come through one of the most demanding years we have seen, is that many staff are not arriving at summer with a full tank to draw on. They are arriving at it already running low. Six weeks of partial rest, partial work and partial worry is not the reset the system assumes it to be.
The final weeks set the tone How the summer break begins matters as much as what happens during it. The final weeks of term are usually intensive and staff finishing term depleted and resentful carry that into the break.
The end of a hard year is also a moment when many staff members take stock, and what they conclude is sometimes significant. Some decide quietly during summer that they will leave. Others decide to stay but pull back from the discretionary contribution that schools depend on. Leaders who do not create space for honest end-of-year conversations may miss these signals.
What leaders can do: before, during and after
The summer itself and the first days of September each offer specific opportunities. None of what follows requires additional budget. All of it requires deliberate choice. In the final weeks of term, the most important thing leaders can do is reduce the
In September, resist the temptation to use INSET as an opportunity to launch new initiatives before staff have had a chance to settle. Some schools have started using the first day back differently, creating space for teams to reconnect and name what they are bringing into the new year before they are asked to absorb anything new. It takes a fraction of the day and sets a different tone for the weeks that follow. In the first week back, have individual conversations with your team. Not to assess readiness, but to ask honestly how people have returned. Some will have used the summer to reach a conclusion about their future in the role or the school. Finding that out early is infinitely better than discovering it in November, when options for support are narrower.
Summer is not a wellbeing strategy The six-week break is a structural feature of the school year, not a substitute for addressing the conditions that make the year so hard. Used thoughtfully, it gives staff the time to decompress from a year that has asked so much of most of them. Left unmanaged, it is simply a pause before the same conditions begin again.
What your staff carry into the break, and what they return to in September, is shaped more by leadership choices than by the calendar. The next two or three weeks are not just the end of the year. For many of your staff, they are the beginning of whether next year will be any different.
For further information and practical advice, visit: u
https://welbee.co.uk
www.education-today.co.uk 23
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