Looking after teacher mental health
On March 31st, data and reporting from the annual ACU Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey was released, and Assoc Prof Paul Kidson noted that one key stressor for principals is staff mental health.
Just as we’ve planned holistically (hopefully 😊) for student wellbeing for many years, so too we can think about and support staff mental health in a simple, structured way. This is reassuring for leaders as it enables them to enact a proactive, visible stance on such an important issue.
The Integrated Approach to Workplace Mental Health (La Montagne, et al., 2014) is a terrific Australian model for our purposes, that has been revised and extended by many industries here. The three levels for workplaces to consider are often described as:
- Protect: Identify and control work-related risks to mental health
- Respond: identify and respond to signs of people experiencing mental ill-health or distress
- Promote: Recognise and enhance the positive aspects of work that contribute to good mental health (Blueprint for Mentally Healthy Workplaces, 2024).
School leaders and staff wellbeing teams can use these three aspects to gather data on what’s currently happening in their school, identify priorities, plan and implement next steps (and, of course, monitor and review). It’s a straightforward way to get started in understanding what can be done to support teacher mental health, and shift the dial from an ambiguous stressor to one that can be named, planned for and managed.
References
Martin, A., Page, K.M. et al. Workplace mental health: developing an integrated intervention approach. BMC Psychiatry 14, 131 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-244X-14-131
National Mental Health Commission, Mentally Healthy Workplace Alliance. Blueprint for Mentally Healthy Workplaces (release 3). Sydney: NMHC; 2024.
Melinda Phillips, Director/Principal Psychologist at Compassionate Schools.
School, team and individual services available to Australian schools and teachers; please feel free to contact us.
