WELLBEING Who cares for the carers?
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 – explains why headteacher and SLT wellbeing is education’s most important conversation.
• Professional coaching or supervision. A dedicated, confidential space with a qualified person where the leader can process what they are carrying, think clearly and be challenged in a way that builds rather than diminishes them.
• Strong peer networks. Not the performative variety, but trusting relationships with other leaders who face similar pressures and are willing to be honest about what that actually feels like.
• Data that surfaces their own wellbeing, not just the staff’s. The most forward-thinking trusts are beginning to include senior leaders in wellbeing conversations as participants, not just interpreters. Regular checks that include the leadership tier can surface warning signs before they become crises.
The case for speaking first I
n most conversations I have with headteachers about wellbeing, I don’t just ask “How are your staff?” but “How are you?” There is often a slight shift in posture and something honest may come out. Other times it may be a version of “fine, you know, it’s busy” – delivered with the kind of practiced ease that tells you the real answer is something else entirely.
Senior leaders are the highest-risk group in the profession. Stress rates among headteachers and senior leaders consistently sit above those of classroom teachers and support staff. And yet, when we talk about wellbeing in schools, we almost always position leaders as the solution – the ones who build the culture, hold the psychological safety and ‘create space’ for others. The conversation about who does the same for them often remains unfinished.
The shock absorber at the top I speak regularly with headteachers and senior leaders about culture, wellbeing and what actually goes on beneath the surface. One image comes up repeatedly, in different forms: the idea that the senior leader is the school’s or trust’s shock absorber. They take the impact of Ofsted uncertainty, of funding pressures, of a struggling child whose family is in crisis, of a member of staff on the edge of burnout – and they absorb it, so that the rest of the school does not have to feel the full force.
For a time, that is leadership. But shock absorbers wear out. And when they do, there is often nobody positioned to notice, because the absorber has spent years making sure nothing gets through.
The silence is structural
It would be easy to frame this as a personal failing, as too many leaders are simply being too proud to ask for help. But I think the silence is structural. We have built a system where the headteacher and trust leaders are, in effect, accountable for everything: outcomes, culture, community, compliance, and now, wellbeing itself. To admit to struggling within that system can feel professionally dangerous in a way it simply does not for other staff. There is also the loneliness of the role to contend with. Senior leaders often describe the experience of having nobody they can speak to candidly within their own building. They may not be able to fully disclose their anxieties to other SLT, for fear of eroding confidence. They cannot always show vulnerability to their trustees or governors, for fear of raising questions about their capacity. And outside the school, their peer network may be limited or competitive. The result can be a kind of professional isolation that accumulates quietly, over months and years.
In my January article, I flagged professional supervision for headteachers as something ‘on the horizon.’ I want to be more direct now: it is not a nice-to-have. It is a necessity. In social work and clinical psychology, supervision is not optional, it is a professional standard precisely because the emotional weight of the work demands a structured outlet. Education routinely deals with equivalent levels of trauma, complexity and responsibility, without anything close to the same infrastructure of support.
Good support for senior leaders does not mean sending them on a course. It means building consistent, structured access to three things:
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There is also something powerful that happens when a trust leader or headteacher speaks honestly about their own experience. It can help shift culture in a way that no policy or wellbeing initiative ever could. When the person at the top says ‘I find this hard too, and here is what I do about it,’ they make it safe for everyone beneath them to do the same. They model the psychological safety they are trying to build. This is the paradox at the heart of leadership wellbeing: the leader who is honest about their own struggles is not weaker for it. They are, in practice, more effective. Staff trust them more. Teams are more honest in return. The school becomes a place where difficulty can be named and therefore addressed, rather than hidden until it becomes a crisis.
What leaders, trusts and schools can do now If you lead a trust or a school, I want to leave you with one challenge and one action. The challenge is this: look at your wellbeing strategy and ask how well it includes the senior leaders, as recipients of care, not just providers of it. If it isn’t done well enough, then it is incomplete. The action is simpler. Have the conversation. Reach out to your fellow trust leaders, headteachers and senior leaders this week, not to ask how the school, their function or their staff are doing, but to ask how they are doing. Make it a genuine question. Then most importantly make time to listen to the answer.
We ask so much of the people who lead trusts and schools. The least we can do is make sure that someone, somewhere, is asking them the same questions we expect them to ask of everyone else.
For further information and practical advice, visit: u
https://welbee.co.uk
May 2026
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