Actions and impact

What’s​ next?

• Consider the possible staff perception that senior leaders are generators of stress for staff and how best to address this.
• Continue observing your attitudes, behaviour and interaction with others. Notice what you do to reinforce care for your staff.
• Focus on cultivating opportunities for staff to develop healthy relationships and raise morale.
• Check in (informally) with your wellbeing buddy at least once a week. Discuss your observations of yourself.

You can follow up this unit by…

• exploring ideas and strategies to support staff and raise wellbeing standards. What practical initiatives can be implemented to help staff?
• agreeing action steps that will improve staff wellbeing and increase engagement.

Alternative/additional development activity

Prepare for a whole-staff wellbeing audit. Assign responsibility to one or two SLT members to examine the key areas, such as

• perceptions of stress,
• work-life balance,
• physical, mental and emotional symptoms,
• how staff perceive they are supported under stress (or not),
• home life stressors
• and measuring how well they feel they are coping.

Use the Stressometer and the stress questionnaire as a starting point. If you want to undertake an audit prior to the full staff training, you can create an ‘our school’ specific series of questions and use an easy to respond and assess online tool such as Survey Monkey to complete it. There are also other external resources available from the Teacher Support Network  such as The Stress Test  and The Wheel of Wellbeing as quick overviews to gauge your staff wellbeing baseline.

Begin preliminary discussions about setting up a whole-school wellbeing forum. Assign responsibility for overseeing the birthing of the wellbeing forum and key issues to address. You can initiate this immediately or wait until the five units are complete before initiating the forum.

What’s changed?

Evaluate the impact of the unit. Ask participants to complete the evaluation sheet if appropriate or simply discuss the progress the team is making. Invite each participant to share one area they have found useful and one personal commitment they will begin to apply to help reduce their own levels of stress to increase their wellbeing.

Before closing:

• Set date and time for next training. Suggest no longer than a two week interval.
• Thank your team for their participation and continued efforts.
• Emphasise the importance of the SLT having heightened awareness and emotional intelligence for the school to strengthen as a cohesive community.