Picture two staffrooms. In the first, wellbeing means a mindfulness poster, a fruit basket on INSET day, and reminders to practise self-care — while the marking policy, the meeting schedule, and the email culture grind on unchanged. In the second, there are no posters, but the school retired its triple-marking expectation last term, protects PPA fiercely, and the headteacher never emails after 5pm. Which school would you rather work in?
The comparison exposes the false choice at the heart of most wellbeing debates. One camp says wellbeing is personal: build resilience, set boundaries, look after yourself. The other says it is structural: reduce workload, fix culture, and individuals will be fine. Both camps are partly right: meaningful wellbeing change is both an individual and an institutional responsibility.
Why self-help alone is not enough
Understanding what causes your own stress, auditing your workload, protecting recovery, asking for help early, keeping fit — these are self-help skills. They change lives. But self-help has a limited impact if the school culture overrides it. A teacher can set a personal email strategy; if the school’s culture expects replies by 10pm the same day, the strategy is ineffective. A teacher can streamline their marking; if the policy demands triple marking, the streamlining won’t work. Asking teachers to cope with pressures the organisation could remove is not a wellbeing strategy. In its Management Standards,The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) identifies six factors behind work-related stress:
· Control: How much say or autonomy a worker has over how andwhen they do their work.
· Support: The encouragement, resources, and backing providedby colleagues and management.
· Relationships: Promoting positive working relationships,preventing conflict, and dealing with unacceptable behaviour like bullying.
· Role: Whether people fully understand their duties,responsibilities, and alignment within the organisation.
· Change: How organisational changes, whether large orsmall, are communicated and managed.
The HSE factors are mainly the responsibility of the school, not the individual teacher. When Education Support’s Teacher Wellbeing Index 2025 asked staff why they were considering leaving for example, two-thirds pointed to workload volume: an organisational cause, requiring an organisational cure.
Shared responsibility
So, the answer to the question, “Teacher Wellbeing: Who’s responsible?” is both the individual teacher and the school. My own opinion is that the balance is 25% the responsibility of the teacher and 75% the school. Individuals practise sustainable working — stress awareness, workload control, recovery, seeking help. Leadership builds the workplace culture in which those strategies thrive — measuring how staff are, acting on what the data says, fixing the systems that create unnecessary pressure, and making it safe to talk and share concerns. Each strand reinforces the other: personal strategies give staff the energy to engage with change; cultural change ensures that personal strategies are effective.
This is exactly how we built the Teach Well Programme, the self-study programme inside Teach Well Toolkit School Membership. The programme gives every member of staff practical self-help strategies for managing stress, reducing workload, and planning for recovery. It also gives a senior leader or Mental Health Lead a step-by-step method for monitoring the school’s level of responsibility for building the workplace culture: baseline survey, action plan, workload systems, and a school that talks about mental health. Shared responsibility for staff wellbeing — because that is what the evidence, and every staffroom, demands.
Wellbeing is not a poster, nor is it a policy on paper. It is what happens when a school accepts its share of the responsibility for taking care of its staff. If your school is ready, our FREE Staff Wellbeing Survey is the place to start your journey.
References
Education Support (2025)Teacher Wellbeing Index 2025. Available at:
https://www.educationsupport.org.uk/resources/for-organisations/research/teacher-wellbeing-index/
Health and SafetyExecutive, Management Standards for work-related stress. Available at:
https://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/