Bridging the Gap: Transforming Staff Wellbeing in Education

There’s no shortage of conversations about staff wellbeing in education. We openly discuss workload, burnout, and sustainability. We recognize that overworking has become normalized, and exhaustion is not a badge of honour. Cultures need to change.

Increasingly, we see leaders and organizations actively trying to respond. They introduce wellbeing strategies, conduct workload reviews, and offer training sessions designed to support staff and make roles more sustainable.

Yet, despite this awareness and effort, meaningful change often feels frustratingly difficult to achieve.

Understanding the Challenge

It’s this gap between knowing and doing that I keep returning to. Why does change often stall? Why do initiatives with good intentions struggle to embed? Do our efforts to improve wellbeing sometimes underestimate just how complex change in schools really is?

These questions stem from my experience as a headteacher and the work I now do alongside school leaders. In both roles, I see the same tension: a desire to create change, alongside cultural, organizational, and emotional constraints that make it difficult to sustain.

Increasingly, evidence suggests the problem is not a lack of awareness but something deeper.

Listening To What We Already Know

The latest Edurio Staff Experience Report (2025), based on responses from over 80,000 school staff, shows that 41% of educators are considering leaving the profession. The reasons are familiar: feeling undervalued, overworked, and affected by negative organizational culture.

This isn’t new information for the sector, yet it hasn’t translated into sustained or significant change.

That tells us something important. Awareness, while essential, is not enough on its own. There’s a disconnect between what we know and what shifts in practice, shaped by organizational priorities, cultural narratives, and professional identity.

When Wellbeing Becomes An Add-On

One reason wellbeing initiatives struggle to have an impact is that they are often introduced alongside existing pressures. Instead of changing the conditions that created those pressures, wellbeing becomes something additional: another session, another initiative, another expectation.

This helps explain why staff sometimes respond to wellbeing initiatives with quiet scepticism or fatigue. It’s not resistance to wellbeing itself, but a recognition that nothing fundamental has shifted.

Why Leadership Behaviour Matters More Than Policy

Alongside workload sits another critical factor: leadership behaviour. Evidence suggests that staff wellbeing is shaped less by written strategies and more by day-to-day leadership practice. This includes clarity around expectations, fairness, consistency, and what is role-modelled as acceptable.

Many leaders want to do things differently. They care deeply about their staff and are acutely aware of the pressures people are under. At the same time, they operate within systems that prioritize pace, performance, and compliance, often leaving little space to pause, reflect, or recalibrate.

Expectations are shaped not only by policy but also by accountability pressures, time constraints, and deeply embedded norms about what leadership looks like in practice.

In this context, even when wellbeing strategies exist on paper, leadership behaviour can remain constrained by the conditions around it. Research on psychological safety consistently shows that leaders play a central role in shaping whether people feel able to speak up, admit strain, or set limits without fear of judgment. Where the system restricts this, wellbeing strategies can struggle to move beyond intent into lived experience.

The Problem Of Weak Evaluation

Another challenge lies in how success is measured.

In many schools, wellbeing initiatives are rarely evaluated beyond participation or immediate feedback. While positive responses are encouraging, they don’t tell us whether workload has reduced, stress has eased, or behaviour has changed over time.

Organizational change research consistently highlights the gap between implementation and impact. Without feedback loops, reflection, and adaptation, ineffective initiatives are often repeated, and opportunities for learning are lost.

When Responsibility Shifts Onto Individuals

There’s also a broader pattern worth naming. Wellbeing in education is still frequently framed at an individual level, focusing on resilience, self-care, or mindset.

While these approaches can be supportive, they also place responsibility back onto individuals to cope with conditions they didn’t create. Critical occupational health research warns that this can lead to the 'responsibilisation' of staff, where systemic issues are reframed as personal challenges.

The evidence is clear: individual-level interventions tend to have smaller effects than those that address work design, leadership practice, and organizational culture. Individual coping strategies cannot compensate for systemic stressors.

Culture, Identity, And The Beliefs Beneath Behaviour

Beyond organizational priorities lies culture—the beliefs and expectations that shape how people respond to change.

I remember a pastoral lead who was visibly exhausted. We adjusted her timetable to create protected time away from the emotional intensity of her role. Yet she rarely used it. She would say, “I can’t step back today. There’s an issue I need to deal with, and I can’t let the child down.”

Even when the structure changed, the underlying belief that caring meant constant availability remained far stronger.

This is the heart of the challenge. Organizational change is fundamentally cultural change. If a change doesn’t fit the existing culture, it won’t stick, even when that culture is no longer creating healthy or sustainable environments.

Education carries the ghosts of its past. Beliefs, norms, and narratives continue to shape what people see as required or expected. You hear it in phrases like, “This is the way we’ve always done things.”

Identity plays a significant role here. Many educators enter the profession with a strong sense of purpose, and teaching is often understood as a vocation. Over time, this sense of purpose can blur the boundaries between school and home, with consequences for identity and sustainability.

Letting go of unsustainable ways of working can involve a form of mourning. It means releasing an idealized professional identity that once felt noble but is no longer sustainable. These ghosts continue to shape how educators judge themselves and interpret what it means to care well.

This is why cultural change requires sensitivity. When work has become bound up with identity and ideas of professionalism and care, you cannot simply ask people to work differently or assume that policies will change behaviour. Lasting improvement depends on reshaping the conditions in which people work and lead.

Looking Beneath The Surface

Wellbeing change in education sits at the intersection of organizational priorities, cultural norms, and professional identity. These factors do not operate in isolation. They interact continuously, shaping what feels possible, acceptable, and sustainable in practice.

This is why wellbeing change is often oversimplified. It cannot be reduced to initiatives, policies, or individual resilience without attending to the complex systems beneath them.

In my next blog, I’ll explore what research and practice suggest does help make wellbeing change sustainable and what makes healthier ways of working possible in practice.

References

Bakker, A. B., & Demerouti, E. (2007). The Job Demands–Resources model: State of the art. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 22(3), 309–328. https://doi.org/10.1108/02683940710733115

Ball, S. J. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215–228. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0268093022000043065

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Academy of Management Journal, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Edurio. (2025). Staff experience report. Edurio. https://home.edurio.com/resources/insights/school-staff-experience-report/

Kinman, G., & Wray, S. (2020). Work-related stress in schools and colleges. Education Support. DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2020.1793934