Teacher mental ill-health: exploring key risk factors and co-designing a brief, pragmatic intervention

Teachers experience high levels of work-related stress, which can have negative implications for their mental health and the retention of the workforce. Current psychosocial interventions aimed at supporting teachers are often poorly implemented in practice and have equivocal effects. Involving end users in the co-design of teacher-focused mental health programmes has the potential to establish more acceptable, feasible and effective approaches.

Aims:

This PhD project will investigate the key risk factors for poor mental health among state-funded primary and secondary school teachers and use this knowledge to co-design an intervention for reducing work-related stress, anxiety and depression in teachers, and which can be delivered within the time and resource constraints of an educational context.

Methods: Four studies will be conducted: Study 1: An umbrella review investigating teacher mental health programmes and the key mechanisms targeted.

Study 2: Conduct a survey and interviews with teachers and senior leaders, to explore what teachers believe are the key factors that need to be addressed in an intervention and how to best deliver that intervention. Study 3: Conduct participatory workshops with teachers and senior leaders in schools to co-design an intervention.

Study 4: Carry out a preliminary evaluation of the intervention's feasibility, acceptability and potential for impact. Discussion:

This work could provide a scalable intervention that could improve mental health outcomes and work-related stress for teachers and could be implemented within a whole-school approach. This could have wider implications for school mental health and retention of the teacher workforce.