As we begin the new school year, I want to share some content which I genuinely believe will help you with your wellbeing throughout the year ahead.
The position of a senior leader has become so demanding that we need to recalibrate our relationship with the job. In some cases the workload has taken over even who we are. I was speaking with a recently retired head who said that the time creep of the job had meant that he had side-lined all the interests and hobbies that he’d had, simply to create time to get the work done and even then he didn’t get it all done.
Thriving Under Pressure
As a school leader, I would have laughed at the suggestion that I could continually thrive under the unrelenting and immense pressure. It felt like there was never a time when I wasn’t under pressure, it was just that the severity of the pressure changed slightly.
Term times were the worst for pressure and stress but I can distinctly remember taking calls from builders, contractors and site staff during the summer holidays whilst sat on the beach in Tenby with my family. Those were the easy calls. The tough ones were, as DSL (Designated Safeguarding Lead), I was called about things that were happening in real time with the children from my school and their families. As a DSL you are always on call and it feels like you are never off duty.
Annual Leave and ‘downtime’
Having moved out of school leadership now there is a far clearer demarcation between worktime and annual leave. Annual leave is seen as sacrosanct and untouchable as time away from the pressure of work. That doesn’t mean to say that I don’t check my emails from time to time but it isn’t an expectation that I do something about those emails.
I think school leaders should be afforded the same “downtime” in terms of their annual leave, and towards the end of my headship I was referring to my holiday time as annual leave so that those not working in schools understood that this was my “downtime.”
The title of this blog might seem at odds with what I’ve just talked about but for us to be truly effective at work and have any chance of thriving, we need to make sure we nourish our wellbeing and work with a freshness.
“Self Care is about giving those you work and live with, the best of you, not what is left of you!”
I’d like you to consider how you work whilst at school. The prevailing model is one where you work the hours that it takes to get the job done. That leads to working weeks in excess of 60 hours and even then there are things that you won’t get done. The chances are that as you get into 50-60 hours of work, your work rate efficiency slows down. This means that it takes longer to do the work, you become more tired and the following day you are less efficient at work and maybe snappier with those around you. At very least you become progressively less effective in the role.
In some cases you become almost a hostage to the work and where this persists over a longer period of time the effectiveness of the school becomes synonymous with our effectiveness, which is why when the school is criticised we feel it personally as school leaders.
As a headteacher I wouldn’t have known where to start with addressing this and regaining a sense of wellbeing balance, but things have changed hugely and this last academic year I have worked with over 100 school leaders to help them understand their wellbeing and how they can support their wellbeing, and how this has a positive impact on their ability to support wellbeing across the whole school.
It won’t be a surprise to know that there are a lot of school leaders that are struggling with their mental health and wellbeing, largely due to workload and a lack of finance to help relieve that workload. However there are an increasing number who are making positive decisions about what they are doing to nourish their physical and mental health and as such, have a broader context into which to place “the job”.
So this isn’t about prescribing a silver bullet solution, but is a way to help you think about the things that you might want to do, that will help you to regain a wellbeing balance which supports work life, home life and your mental and physical health both now and into the future.
It also will require you (if you want to make that change and see the benefits) to make difficult decisions and stick to them. We all know how the commitment to new year’s resolutions start to fade by the end of January so having an accountability buddy (someone who helps you stay committed or even does the activity with you) is vital.
However, the benefit of you sticking to your personal wellbeing commitments goes way beyond your own health and wellbeing. Staff who have heard you talk about the importance of wellbeing will be so much more committed to their own wellbeing needs when they see you as the school leader role modelling it.

Andy Mellor
Director of Wellbeing, SAS
