The latest report into principal health and wellbeing highlighted soaring workloads, with almost all principals (97%) working overtime and close to 70% working more than 56 hours a week during school term and 25 hours a week during the holidays.
Three in ten (30%) of principals received a ‘red flag’ email alerting them to contact employee support services. Red flag emails are triggered when school leaders taking the survey are considered at risk of self-harm, occupational health problems or serious impacts to their quality of life.
As schools struggle through the post-Covid challenges, both human and administrative, of Term 2, many educators are doing their best to keep their own heads above water whilst attending to the marked decline in the mental health of the students they teach.
Recognising this, school workforce specialist PeopleBench have launched The Workforce Resilience TrackerTM – designed “specifically for schools with the input of schools” to make a measurable impact on workforce resilience – an area many schools do not track or feel equipped to manage.
Through a short, anonymous survey that is based on a practical psychometric scale, the tracker captures the resilience of a school’s workforce. Once a school is capturing and tracking resilience, a dashboard provides insights and resources to help make a plan to maintain their strengths and boost the areas that need development.
"School leaders have a responsibility to their staff to model healthy practices and create roles, structures, processes, and cultures that make a resilient response easier,” PeopleBench CEO Fleur Johnston told The Educator.
“A key benefit of the Workforce Resilience TrackerTM is the visibility it provides to principals—they can see how their workforce is doing now and how that trends over time”.
Johnston said principals also have the data and the resources to incorporate workforce resilience into their School Improvement planning process.
“Rather than basing plans and interventions on intuition or guesswork, the Workforce Resilience TrackerTM helps principals measure and manage workforce wellbeing and resilience from a position of informed strategy”.
Johnston said research shows that teachers who are capable of a resilient response are more able to adapt, recover, and continue to perform well in their jobs, even though they may be journeying through change and challenge.
“Educators manage extraordinary stressors in their work; we as a community owe them all the support we can provide. This starts with understanding where their natural resilience strengths lie, and where they could use additional resources and tools,” she said.
“By combining academic rigour with real-world pragmatism, PeopleBench can help improve individual and school-wide staff resilience”.