Decentring the 'resilient teacher': exploring interactions between individuals and their social ecologies

There is currently a teacher retention crisis in the UK and beyond. One in five teachers in the UK plan to leave teaching within the next five years and a third of teachers report experiencing a mental health issue. Worryingly, one in ten teachers and school leaders reported feeling suicidal in 2018-19, and there is evidence that teacher wellbeing has dropped further still post-pandemic. The demands of the profession also have an impact on pupils, with happy productive classrooms depending on happy teachers. Given that teachers will play a key role in supporting children to recover from the impact of the pandemic both academically and emotionally, the need to promote teacher resilience has never been more urgent.

This project will adopt a socio-ecological approach to promoting teacher resilience, which views resilience not as something which resides solely within the teacher, but as distributed across the individual, their environment and the interactions between them. The project will bring together interdisciplinary expertise from across education and psychology with professional expertise and experience from teachers, school leaders, policy consultants, the National Education Union (NEU) and the charity, Education Support. These project partners/advisers will come together in a series of Education Innovation Labs to contribute to each stage of the research process. The project will have 4 key phases:

1. Quantitative phase - Survey data will be collected from teachers across England. This will help us to model the relationships between different factors related to teacher resilience (both at the individual and school level) and how they affect key outcomes such as wellbeing, job satisfaction and risk of burnout.

2. Participatory research phase - A range of 'ecology-mapping' methods will be designed and used with teachers to explore how these factors play out in teachers' working lives. This will help us to put the quantitative findings into context as well as generating new understandings about which factors are most significant to teachers working in specific contexts. This mapping phase will take place across 5 primary schools (3 working together within one academy trust) and 3 secondary schools in England. The schools will act as project partners throughout the project, contributing to research design and analysis of the findings as well as collecting data within schools.

3. Developing pathways to resilience - The findings from the previous two phases will be used to develop ways to promote school resilience at both the individual and school level. The research team will work together with project partners and advisers in the Education Innovation Labs to develop 'ecological interventions' (interventions aimed at the school environment as well as individual teachers). A bank of resilience strategies will be generated within the Labs, drawing upon existing research as well as the academic and professional expertise across the project partner team. Participating teachers at the 8 project partner schools will develop interventions tailored to their individual needs and school contexts, which will draw upon and extend this bank of strategies. The schools will implement the interventions and evaluate the impact that they have on teacher resilience using a mixed methods approach.

4. Broadening impact - We will share the findings with schools across the UK as well as researchers within the field. The project partner schools will cascade training to the other schools in their trusts and alliances. A training package, generated by the project, will be made freely available online and will be promoted UK wide through the NEU, Education Support and MMU's teacher education networks. An online course will also be created for student teachers and promoted to UK universities. This work will embedded into the NEU's Value Education, Value Educators strategy and shared with other researchers through conferences and articles.