Health Is Wealth

I haven’t worked with many teachers, or indeed senior leaders for that matter, who describe what they do for a living as just a job. I have worked alongside some who do, to be fair, but the one thing that those particular colleagues all had in common is that they weren’t especially impactful in the classroom, probably because they’d rather be somewhere other than teaching lessons to kids. Both teaching and leading in schools are labours of love, in my experience, and your passion for what you do often becomes so all-encompassing after a while that it’s hard to separate your professional life from what’s left of your personal one.

Everywhere I’ve worked – and I’m onto school number four in a twenty-seven year career so far now – has got completely under my skin. The last two school communities that I’ve belonged to, where I’ve also led the schools, have both utterly taken over my life as a result of my commitment to making them the best schools that they can be that switching off in evenings and at weekends became issues for me to resolve at home. Such, I suspect, is the case for similarly dedicated professionals in schools all over the world; although it might not be the career of choice for everyone, teaching is much more of a calling than it will ever be simply something that you do each day without really caring a great deal about it.

What a dreadful shame, then, that so many teachers are leaving this most wonderful of professions or are openly complaining online about how the unethical practices of their senior leaders are causing them to lose their love for their jobs. When this happens, it can be so much harder for professionals who have poured such passion into their careers to cope with the disillusion of finding that their days are no longer filled with joy than it can be for professionals in other lines of work to seek to find something different to do. A very sensible course of action in terms of self-care in such instances is for teachers to begin to view teaching, even if just temporarily, as no longer a calling or a passion but rather as simply a job after all. The love has gone and because you can no longer take the strain of giving everything to a job which only gives you negative energy in return, it’s time to put your own needs first.

Let’s be clear that most teachers who reach this desperate point do so because of the actions of others. It is very rare indeed that teachers simply lose their love for teaching without any external circumstances colluding to force them down that particular path, instead it’s because of pressure heaped upon them by unnecessary accountability processes, over-zealous workload demands or the unethical or ineffective behaviours of either overly-ambitious or inexperienced senior leaders, to name but some topical examples. Pushing a loyal teacher who loves their job to the point that they don’t really care anymore and would prefer to leave either the school they once adored or the profession itself is an act which is difficult to both understand and forgive, in my opinion, but the reality is that this is exactly the experience of far too many dedicated professionals in schools in the current climate. But, when the pressure in a school is turned up to such an extent that it’s making a teacher physically or mentally unwell, then the only reasonable choice to make is for the individual affected to leave.

Compared to many professions, the chances are that you’ll never get rich as a teacher, at least not solely in monetary terms. To my mind, however, there are many ways of measuring an individual’s wealth, and financial wellbeing is only an aspect of this. Of greater value, in my honest opinion, is being healthy and happy, not only from a physical but also from a mental perspective. Obviously, we all have financial commitments – bills to pay and all that – so we can’t entirely ignore the need to make enough to get by, but having some extra numbers on the screen when you log into your online bank account isn’t really worth all that much if your health is impacted negatively by going to work each day. If you’ve got a family to look after, anyone who has regularly visited the depths of despair because of the relentless stress and pressure of working in a toxic work environment will surely tell you that it’s impossible to simply suffer in silence and for your family to not also be affected. Even if you keep things to yourself fairly well, your family will know if work is making you ill and ultimately they will begin to worry themselves into an unhealthy state as well.

Not every work environment is a good fit for everyone, even if sometimes it once was. It is normal for things to change over time, but not all changes move in the direction that you’d like them to. Sometimes, a school can change so much and for so many reasons that it can become unrecognisable from the place where you once worked and where you once loved teaching to such an extent that it’s just not the same anymore. At this point, it’s time to plan to move, even if the prospect of change is terrifying at the outset of the process. This could also mean that you take a financial hit in pursuit of something which is now quite frankly a better fit for you than the place which you once thought was absolutely perfect, but so be it because, as noted above, money just isn’t everything. Health is wealth, not the pursuit of the highest possible salary.

You’ll always have to deal with difficult characters in whatever school you work, of course. Nowhere is perfect because humans – particularly those with lofty personal ambitions – are imperfect themselves, so you’ll always need to be adept at coping with challenging circumstances to a certain degree, but if those who you’re currently working alongside are seriously damaging both your professional and personal wellbeing then putting the health of you and your family first is one million percent the right thing to do. If you make the move to another school, you may even find that you become reenergised and learn to love being a teacher again, which means that another generation of kids get to benefit from your experience and expertise in the classroom. The problem, you will find, wasn’t actually you all along – instead, it was simply that you were no longer in the right place for your skills and for your love of your profession to come to the fore.

Teaching is more than a job. Everyone who’s ever been a successful teacher for even a term knows that. As Doug Lemov notes, “There are lots of great jobs you can do in society, but none of them are quite as great, or quite as important, or as profound as the life of a teacher.” If a teacher feels that they have fallen out of love with teaching, then it’s probably more accurate to state that they have fallen out of love with their school and that it’s time to find somewhere else which is a better fit instead and where they can rekindle their passion for the profession. No one – no matter what they do – is going to thrive in an environment which is making them ill, so placing priority upon personal and professional wellbeing should always be given serious consideration. The right school exists for every teacher, even if many find themselves in the wrong one at some point in their career. No one can work without some form of financial renumeration, obviously, but we should forget about chasing the highest salaries out there because health is real wealth.