Teachers are increasingly citing ‘wellbeing’ as a reason for calling in sick, with some schools allowing staff to have ‘duvet days’.
The number of teaching professionals taking time off because of poor mental health has doubled over the past three years, with huge spikes at the end of each term as burnout peaks.
Wellbeing absences are more common at secondary level than primary, data from thousands of schools collated by educational software firm Arbor reveals.
Arbor chief executive James Weatherill told Schools Week magazine the rise ‘is at least in part down to the normalisation of citing wellbeing as a reason for illness’.
He added: ‘Even if you strip out this effect, it shows a steady upward trend that wellbeing issues are taking its toll on staff.’
In June 2021, the wellbeing absence rate – the number of absences per 100 qualified teachers – was 0.2 for both primary and secondary schools. But over the summer, the rate hit a record 1.4 in secondary schools and almost 0.8 in primaries.
This is despite mental health becoming less of a factor in sickness absence among the wider workforce, according to the Office for National Statistics.
A report published this week by Education Support found that 78 per cent of teachers and 84 per cent of leaders reported being stressed.
The charity discovered ‘disturbingly high rates of stress, anxiety and burnout continue to affect education staff, exacerbated by pupil and parent behaviour, and a lack of support outside school for children and young people’.
Ofsted inspections came up as a stress factor for many teachers, with one leader saying a recent inspection was ‘one of the worst professional experiences that I’ve had’.
Schools in England are now expected to be judged with a new ten-point ‘report card’ system after Labour scrapped single-word Ofsted ratings following the suicide of Berkshire headteacher Ruth Perry.
Education Support chief executive Sinead McBrearty said the days off ‘help staff manage their wellbeing and ultimately will cost the system and schools a lot less’.
Some leaders even allow teachers to enjoy ‘duvet days’ or for non-contact time to be completed at home.
Department of Education figures show that nearly 8 million teaching days have been lost to sickness since in-person teaching restarted in May 2021 after the Covid pandemic.
Joanna Marchong, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, told The Daily Telegraph: ‘Alongside their generous holiday entitlements, hundreds of thousands of teachers are frequently absent, leaving classrooms in disarray and forcing taxpayers to bear the significant costs of finding covers.’
