Secondary teachers rate ‘excessive demands’ as top cause of workplace stress

More than 90% of Scottish secondary teachers rank “excessive demands” as the number one cause of stress in their workplace, a teaching union has revealed.

A new survey released by the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association’s (SSTA) health, safety and wellbeing (HSW) committee has revealed 93.7% of respondents ranked excessive workload as a factor affecting their mental health.

The survey of 600 teaching professionals used a framework of the Health and Safety Executive Management Standards to identify and measure the specific root causes of stress in their workplace.

The survey asked teaching staff to rank six factors from most stressful to least stressful.

The number one ranked stressor was the “demands” expected in the workplace, including volume of work and deadlines.

A lack of “support” ranked at number two while “change” referring to poor management of organisational change came in third.

Grant McAllister, convener of the SSTA HSW committee, said the data collected showed the teaching profession has “pushed to the breaking point”.

He said: “These aren’t subjective complaints; this is hard data showing a profession pushed to the breaking point.

“When 94% of teachers flag excessive demands as a core problem, we must stop calling it a ‘workload issue’ and start treating it as a serious risk to health and safety.”

In response, the SSTA HSW committee is launching a demands reduction project.

The first phase, the administrative task audit, will challenge every non-essential reporting and administrative task.

Mr McAllister said: “Our members’ GPs don’t sign them off with workload, they sign them off with work-related stress. The volume of work is simply incompatible with a sustainable career.

“Furthermore, the high ranking of ‘change’ tells a story of constant restructuring and new initiatives being imposed without consultation or the practical support needed to deliver them.

“Our staff are not resisting change; they are resisting change that adds pressure without subtracting unnecessary tasks.”

The committee is calling on school leadership teams to urgently collaborate on implementing strategic changes.

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “Ministers have been clear that reducing class contact will help support teachers and improve education in Scotland, driving improvement and reform in our schools and improving outcomes for their pupils.

“We are committed to working with teaching unions and Cosla to agree our approach to delivering a reduction in class contact time at pace.

“Scotland has the lowest pupil teacher ratio and the highest education spend per person of anywhere in the UK, and the recent exam results underlined the strong recovery we are seeing in schools following the pandemic, with the poverty-related attainment gap narrowing at National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher levels.”