WELLBEING
Wellbeing isn’t an add-on - it’s the foundation
MARK SOLOMONS, creator of Welbee, the online evaluation and staff wellbeing improvement tool, and six times winner in the ERA Awards, tells us why every school and trust needs to put wellbeing at the centre of its culture - and make it stick. they’re struggling.
A wellbeing culture shows up in leadership behaviours, staffroom dynamics, meeting agendas, and performance conversations. It is noticed in whether staff feel able to say they’re not coping without fear of judgement. It’s measured in retention, absence, and, ultimately, student outcomes.
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here’s no shortage of discussion about wellbeing in schools. But for all the awareness days, inset workshops and policy references, many leaders are still some way from embedding it as a day-to-day practice. The 2024 Teacher Wellbeing Index confirms this, with yet another sharp reminder that stress and burnout remain widespread and unresolved.
The reality? Until wellbeing becomes part of the culture, we’ll continue to lose skilled professionals, diminish morale, and compromise student outcomes.
The current picture: a system under strain Education Support’s 2024 Teacher Wellbeing Index, makes for difficult reading, as it does each year, with 78% of education staff reporting stress (and 84% of senior leaders).
It’s not just stress. Half of all education staff say they consider their organisation’s culture has a negative effect on staff’s mental health and wellbeing. Around one-third show signs of burnout.
Contributing factors include unmanageable workload, poor pupil behaviour, complaining parents, stretched funding, and lack of support from wider services. Wellbeing is still too often seen as something to be managed reactively, not a structural priority that underpins performance and retention.
Culture, not tokenism
We all know that embedding wellbeing doesn’t mean simply adding yoga sessions, providing cake or introducing another tick-box questionnaire. It means designing policies, behaviours, and expectations that create psychologically safe and supportive environments.
It’s about shifting the culture around how leaders interact with their teams and all staff, how decisions about workload and change are made, and how people are treated when
A proactive approach makes it more likely that staff feel supported, helping reduce stress, burnout, and unplanned absences, while improving retention. It’s also key to building trust — arguably the most important currency.
Leading by example
Leadership plays a defining role in shaping wellbeing within the culture. Leaders set the emotional tone. They role-model acceptable
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The power of stakeholder feedback A critical part of building a wellbeing-first culture is listening - and acting on what you hear. This means creating structured, consistent ways to gather feedback from staff, students and families. Surveys, listening groups, one-to-ones, stay interviews, and digital tools all have a place. Feedback, when used effectively, is one of the most powerful early detection systems available. It can help identify teams or departments under particular strain; individuals at risk of burnout or absence; frustrations around new initiatives or systems; patterns in workload, behaviour or staff morale.
Combined with other school data, such as absence trends, staff turnover, and performance reviews, it creates a joined-up view that helps leaders take informed, preventive action rather than waiting for issues to escalate.
Collecting data is only the first step; the value is in what leaders do next. Here are a few suggestions.
• Close the loop: Always communicate what you’ve learned and what will change as a result. If nothing changes, explain why.
• Prioritise action: Use data to direct resources and leadership attention to the right areas — before issues become critical.
• Train leaders: Ensure line managers understand how their behaviours impact others and the importance of appreciation and catching people doing well. Equip them to hold wellbeing-focused conversations and recognise early signs of distress.
• Develop response plans: Know what support is available and how staff can access it quickly, confidentially and without stigma.
behaviours. They decide what gets prioritised and resourced. So, if leaders don’t take their own wellbeing seriously, others will follow. Effective leadership involves creating boundaries and respecting them; holding honest, non-performative conversations about capacity; ensuring workload reviews are built into improvement planning; and giving people permission to say “no” or to ask for help.
Building the infrastructure for wellbeing
To embed wellbeing into the trust or school’s DNA, leaders should:
• Align wellbeing with strategic goals: It’s not separate from school improvement — it enables it.
• Invest in the right systems: Use digital tools that streamline feedback collection and most importantly automate reporting and help you move quickly to action.
• Ensure leaders ‘own’ wellbeing: Simply make it part of what happens every day.
• Regularly review impact: Evaluate actions with the same rigour as academic interventions.
This infrastructure gives wellbeing the visibility and credibility it needs. It also ensures the work isn’t reliant on enthusiastic individuals — it becomes embedded into the school’s governance and decision-making.
The link to student outcomes
It’s worth restating what the research continues to show: staff wellbeing is directly linked to student outcomes.
According to the International Baccalaureate’s 2022 report on wellbeing in education, schools with high staff wellbeing also show improved pupil engagement, better attendance, and stronger learning outcomes. In short, investing in your people means investing in your students. Wellbeing must become more than a reactive measure. It needs to be a daily, strategic focus. When this happens, it creates a culture where people want to work and stay, where pupils benefit from calm, consistent teaching, and where improvement is sustainable because the people driving it aren’t burning out. Wellbeing is not an initiative. It’s not a line in the improvement plan. It is the foundation on which everything else is built. And there’s no better time to build it than now.
For further information and practical advice, visit:
https://welbee.co.uk
June 2025
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