About the report

This report explores the mental health and wellbeing of education professionals working across the education sector.

The research study had three main aims, to:

Provide a description of the mental health and wellbeing of education professionals using data collected in 2020.

Analyse trends over time.

Identify differences found in the job roles of senior leaders, school teachers and other roles as appropriate.

The research was conducted using an online survey of education professionals drawn from YouGov’s panel. A total of 3,034 education professionals completed the survey, which was conducted between 24 June and 16 July 2020. The sample included all job roles within the education profession from senior leaders through to support staff. Respondents worked in a variety of settings including early years, and the primary, secondary, further, adult, and vocational education sectors. A detailed breakdown of the respondents by sector, region, gender, age, time spent working in education and ethnicity can be found in Appendix B.

This is the fourth large-scale survey that Education Support has conducted. In 2019 the survey was published as “Teacher Wellbeing Index 2019”, in 2018 “Teacher Wellbeing Index 2018” and previously as “Health Survey 2017

– The mental health and wellbeing of education

professionals in the UK”. These publications are available on its website. Comparisons with the findings from the previous three years have been made throughout this report to identify trends over time. However, it should be noted that the 2020 data relates to education professionals working during a pandemic, which was not the case in earlier years, and so such comparisons need to be viewed with this in mind. The findings in Sections 1, 2 and 3 are shown in percentages, and the findings in Section 4 are the actual scores (Appendix C contains the statistical information for Section 4). Education Support has also published a separate report in September 2020 “Covid-19 and the classroom: Working in

education during the coronavirus pandemic – The impact

on education professionals’ mental health and wellbeing”, which draws on the same dataset, a summary of which follows, and is available on its website.

The Index has been structured around four main themes:

Section 1 Understanding key aspects of what it means to work in the education sector.

Section 2 Identifying aspects of the mental health and wellbeing of education professionals.

Section 3 Describing the support available for mental health and wellbeing in the education sector.

Section 4 Measuring education professionals’ mental wellbeing using the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale.

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The charity for everyone working in education

Health Survey 2017 The mental health and wellbeing of education professionals in the UK Teacher Wellbeing Index 2018 TEACHER WELLBEING INDEX 2019

The charity for everyone working in education