Education workforce – health and wellbeing support: report findings and recommendations

Executive summary

The following report is the result of an Education Workforce Support Project, overseen by the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland (ADES) and the Scottish Government (SG). The report aims to present the findings and recommendations of a five-month collaborative project into how the wellbeing of the education workforce is currently being supported by local authorities (LAs). It will also set out recommendations for next steps to begin to develop a comprehensive, consistent offer of wellbeing support across the country.

The project team^[1]collaborated with LAs and Education Stakeholder Groups (ESGs) such as Trade Unions (TUs) and professional associations, with a very high proportion of respondents contributing information.

The main findings formed the basis for an improvement cycle as shown in Figure 1. The use of data to inform strategy, the collaborative approaches to developing health and wellbeing (HWB) offers based on that strategy and the identification of a continuum of HWB provision were all raised by respondents in the planning phase.

When discussing the offers available, the themes of professional learning (PL) and relational approaches emerged strongly with communication being a constant theme throughout. Approaches to the evaluation of impact was more difficult for the respondents to quantify and suggest that more investigation is required.

The recommendations made are broadly in line with these themes with additional consideration required as to how best to continue support in this area to capitalise on the high degree of collaboration demonstrated by respondents.

1.1 Background

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, national pilots, developed with professional associations, had already been planned to support the wellbeing of education staff. In 2020 the work^[2] of Workstream 6 of the Covid Education Recovery Group (CERG) led to the introduction of wellbeing support for education staff in response to the pandemic. In 2021 a stakeholder group was established to provide support and challenge to the development of the package of support. In 2022 this stakeholder group became the Supporting Workforce Wellbeing Stakeholder Reference Group^[3] (SWWSRG) to guide and oversee a national budgetary spend of around £2m in this area.

It was recognised that LAs were also developing new and innovative approaches to support their education workforce alongside these national offers. This was in addition to the support offered at a corporate level to all employees. To develop a greater understanding of this landscape, this Education Workforce Support Project, overseen by ADES and the SG, was created to gain a comprehensive understanding of current practice as to how education workforce HWB is supported nationally.

1.2 Summary of responses

The response rate to the request to collaborate was 95% overall (97% of LAs and 91% of ESGs)

The collaboration rate was 91% overall (91% for LAs and 91% for ESGs).

This level of response was indicative of the interest and commitment of LAs and ESGs in addressing the HWB of the education workforce across Scotland.

1.3 Summary of Findings

Respondents discussed approaches relating to the offers of support available to the education workforce and insight into how, and by whom, they were created. They discussed the groups of staff that were being targeted by the offers and the methods by which this support was being delivered (mainly via relational approaches or by engaging in PL activities) and on the approaches to communication around uptake of support.

One of the challenges referred to in many of the conversations was the final part of this improvement cycle relating to evaluating the impact that approaches were having on the wellbeing of staff with few respondents being able to offer examples of where they felt this was working well. *Figure 1. Summary findings