Why Do This?
Fundamentally, we believe that supporting teachers to understand themselves better is, in itself, a worthwhile aim. And we have shown that Teaching with Heart can have a positive impact on both teachers' wellbeing and on their self-awareness. However, the benefits go beyond well beyond this.
Educational OUtcomes
Ultimately, the only reason to do anything in education is to improve the life of children. By helping teachers to become more reflective and self-aware, we will enable them to build stronger relationships with a deeper understanding of their students' needs. And it is by understanding our students' needs that we can help them to succeed. Bring a Child to Therapy focuses on developing and enriching this understanding.
We also know that a stressed teacher means a stressed child, and that a stressed child does not learn well. After attending counselling sessions, teaching staff show a measurable decrease in distress levels, which can only have a positive effect on their classroom practice.
Financial Benefits
Investing in staff can be expensive, but ultimately it pays dividends:
- Stress is the single largest cause of absenteeism in schools - larger even than illness.
- In the West Midlands alone, more than 110,000 teaching days were lost to stress-related illness in the past 12 months.
- In Sollihul, stress-related absences in schools cost over £1.3 million over 5 years.
- In addition to the loss of quality first teaching, money spent on supply staff has risen to an average of £59,000 per school.
- Even when they are in school, teachers who are suffering from stress and are under-performing represent a greater drain on resources. Teaching with Heart nurtures a greater degree of self-understanding and resilience, enabling the valuable time of senior and middle-leaders to be focused where it needs to be focused: on school development and raising standards.
- It is getting harder and harder to recruit teachers. On average, it costs schools around £3,000 to recruit teachers. Recruiting senior and middle leaders is even harder, and if a recruitment agency is used, costs can rise to £10,000.
While Teaching with Heart cannot promise to save your school all of this money, investing in staff resilience and wellbeing has been shown to reduce overall expenditure.
Cultural Change
The heart of the service we offer is the opportunity to help to develop the culture of a school. Investing in Teaching with Heart demonstrates to your staff and the whole school community that you believe in your teachers and the relationships they build with your children. It shows them that what they think and believe matters, and it shows them you believe that everyone can be a part of the solution.
Teaching with Heart supports your school to find its own solutions to its own problems, empowering the whole school community to take responsibility for their actions and beliefs, and reducing the feeling that each individual is powerless, or just a cog in a machine.
We hope that the kind of self-reflection we are facilitating - both in groups and individually - will become the norm rather than the exception for every adult working in education. Until then, investing in Teaching with Heart means investing in the future of educational engagement and improvement.