Teacher Burnout with Dr. Helen Kelly

Transcript

KENDRA PARKER:
Alright, I might just kick us off to get us started with our acknowledgement of country and a bit of housekeeping, and I'm sure that we'll get some more people coming to join us as we go through the session. First of all, welcome to the Victorian Academy of Teaching and Leadership. This webinar is part of our thought leadership series of which we have several through the year which are really designed to address emerging trends and issues in education in an after-school webinar session. That doesn't mean it means you can listen at school or go home and finish listening at home if you need to in the middle of it, but just an opportunity to really dig in deeply with some of the things that are impacting us in schools at the moment. So really excited for tonight's webinar and I'll get to talking a bit more about that in a moment. My name is Kendra Parker, and I'm a principal in residence here at the Academy and was previously principal in the outer east at Lysterfield Primary School and prior to that at Mentone Park Primary School.

So been in your shoes many times and understand the work of working in schools and how tricky it is. So I applaud you for putting yourself first even though it might seem hard to do some professional learning that will support you and help you and I think we might hear a bit of a theme tonight. Obviously we're talking about wellbeing, but even finding space to take this time for yourself is just so important and really grateful that you've found time to make it a priority. Before I go on, I'd just like to share our acknowledgement of country that we wrote here at the Academy. For those of you who might recognise the windows behind me, they're actually not behind me but I am in the building in 603 Queensberry Street in North Melbourne which was the original Bastow Institute of Educational Leadership building, a heritage listed building. So I'm on the lands of the Wurundjeri people and I pay my respects to elders past, present and any First Nations people joining us. And of course, I acknowledge the First Nations people as the first teachers and the first learners on this country and the lessons that we can learn from them and pass on from them and as we work together towards equity and access to excellence in education across our state and indeed across our country.

So a couple of housekeeping things before we start, we usually put an etiquette slide up but I think we've been doing these for so long now, we hopefully we all know them. But just a reminder, try and be present. Understanding some of you might get distracted at school or by kids wherever you are, but do this is a really great webinar about your wellbeing and for you and you will gain so much out of it if you can really take the time to be present and enjoy it and keep yourself involved. If you can keep your microphone on mute, that would be appreciated until we get to Question time. There's a few structured question sessions, Q&A sessions through the webinar tonight. So you will get a chance to ask those. But I also really encourage you, if you have questions as things come up, to pop them in the chat. I'm here as your moderator and host and I'll be monitoring those so that Helen can respond to them in those Q&A breaks. If you can leave your camera on, that's terrific because it's always nice as a presenter to see some faces and some reactions but understanding that that's not always possible and comfortable for everybody.

So please do what makes you comfortable in that space. And finally, just to note that we are recording this session and it will become available. So if you have any concerns about that, please message us and let us know but that that will include our Q&A session unless someone particularly would like it not to be recorded, you can let us know at the time. Alright, that's enough about me. We're here to hear from Doctor Helen Kelly who I'm just so excited to meet virtually. I first listened to a podcast of Helen myself last year and I got so much out of it. So I'm really excited that the academy is able to present your work here today. Helen is an author, consultant, researcher, school culture and wellbeing expert, and also is an ex-school leader and led international schools in Asia and Europe before retiring in 2020. And I think we'll hear a little bit more about that and how your experience in school leadership, Helen, has really got you into this space that you're working in now and the importance of well-being.

She's been conducting research in the field of educator wellbeing for almost a decade, and prior to becoming an educator, spent ten years as a lawyer in the field of workplace health and safety. So from this diverse experience, Helen brings a unique and valuable perspective to her work. She draws upon her knowledge of evidence-based practices, her understanding of the needs of school communities, and her legal background to deliver approaches that are strategic, effective, and have long-term impact on individual wellbeing and school culture. So enjoy the session and I'll hand over now to Doctor Helen Kelly to take us through the next 90 minutes. Thanks, Helen.

DR HELEN KELLY:
Thank you, Kendra. Good afternoon everyone. It's 7 a.m here on the west coast of Ireland. We've just come into summer. I imagine our temperatures are probably about the same as you have in winter. I think we have a possibly a glorious 15 degrees C this afternoon and sunshine. So we're all getting very excited. Before I start, I just want to thank Kendra and the Academy for inviting me to give this webinar today. I hope that you've all had a good day so far. And as Kendra said, this is time for you to think about yourself, to not feel guilty, to learn some things that might help you. And if you are principals or school leaders in some way, to think about how you might help the staff in your school. So I'm going to start sharing my slides now. OK, there we go. We're just going to work through those first few slides that we don't need now. OK, so let's think a little bit about what we're going to cover. We have 90 minutes. There'll be opportunities throughout the session for you to ask questions.

So as Kendra said, please put your questions in the box or you can ask questions live when we come to those sessions. So today we're looking at several things. The first is to understand why educator well-being is important. I think it's crucial that we start there so that we don't dismiss the importance of it. As educators, principals and teachers, we're able to overcome that guilt of looking after ourselves. And then I use something called the burnout continuum as a framework for considering educator well-being and I'll explain what that is and why I use it. Then I want to sit the end, by the end to be able to recognize the signs and symptoms of burnout so that we can understand what's happening to us. And just as importantly, we can identify what's happening to those around us. And also, obviously very important to understand what the causes of burnout are or if we turn that around, what are the factors that actually impact our well-being positively? Then I'm going to look for a little while at what school leaders can do to help prevent burnout in their staff.

And then we're going to finish up with looking at what individual educators, principals and teachers can do to help prevent burnout in themselves. So let's make a start. So we're going to start with why educator well-being is important. So we know from a whole bunch of research going back decades that healthy employees are more effective employees. Now, I think it's important to say as Kendra mentioned, all of my work is evidence-based. So none of what I'm showing you now or telling you later is just because I think it's so. It's because people who are much more clever than I am have dedicated their lives to researching in this field. And what we know is that healthy employees have more energy, they concentrate better, they complete tasks more effectively, they make better decisions, they're more reliable. And when times get tough, and let's face it, we've experienced some of that in the last few years, they are more resilient. We also know that if we're healthy, we're less likely to be absent from work.

But just as important, or possibly even more important is we're less likely to engage in what's called presenteeism and presenteeism is something that we do a lot in schools. It's when we come into work when we're not feeling well. And although we don't have research from the education sector, we know in the corporate world that presenteeism costs organisations more in lost productivity than absenteeism. What we also know is that healthy employees are less likely to leave their school and they're less likely to leave the profession. And there's another whole section of research which, you know, you can look at in more detail in my book if you're interested in the significant impact that teacher turnover and principal turnover has on the effectiveness of schools specifically related to student outcomes. So what we're trying to do is keep employees in our schools as healthy as possible, as often as possible and reduce those turnover rates and increase school effectiveness. But what we actually know all over the world and the research is the same wherever I work, whether it be in the Far East, whether it be in Canada, whether it be in Europe, whether it be in the UK or Ireland or indeed in Australia, that actually we have a problem with educator wellbeing.

So some data that's been provided to me here by the Academy and you can see that this is from the AI TSL from September last year, that we do have increasing numbers of teachers reporting their intentions to leave the profession before retirement and that's something that we need to be concerned about. But tying this to well-being, what we know is that the main reason that teachers are giving for leaving the profession before retirement are connected to what they call workload and coping. And you can see that graph at the very top, workload and coping. You can see the dates there from 2019 through to 2022, incredibly high numbers and unfortunately a little bit of an increase in 2022. What do they mean when they say workload and coping? Well, if we delve a little bit more deeply into the research, they're saying work-life balance is a problem and a reason that they're thinking of leaving the profession. Also mental health and wellbeing and high workload and they're all things that we're going to talk about today.

So while healthy employees make more effective employees, we're seeing that actually significant numbers of our teaching population and school leader population in Australia are not doing well. What about principles? Well, we know from research from June last year that principles in Victoria experience worse health and wellbeing outcomes than the general population and that's actually the same across the whole of Australia. They have higher stress, burnout and sleeping troubles and they also experience a higher incidence of mental injury than other school staff. And I know myself from the familiarity with the research in this area that's been done in Australia with the principal survey that actually principals in Australia are 1.7 times more likely to burn out than the general population. And actually, Australia and New Zealand are the only countries in the world that have done that research and actually have those statistics. We also know that an increase in number of principals in Victoria report being close to what they call tipping point with their well-being and that fits very closely with my own research where I ask principals whether they have come close to breaking point and a significant percentage, certainly more than half and as much as 70% in my own research, depending on the context, say that at some point they have come close to breaking point connected with their work.

So really some reasons there to, you know, be really concerned. We also know that mental injury made up 48% of principals worker's compensation claims between 2015 and 21. And recent research shows that we have no reason to believe that things have improved. Certainly, the pandemic has produced a whole range of contextual factors that have increased the pressures on principals and teachers and we also know that recent research from Victoria has shown that the situation is not improving. So I want to turn now to think about what burnout is and how we recognize it. I use this burnout continuum as a framework to think about well-being and the reason I do that is that wellbeing is in many ways quite a nebulous concept. There are also many frameworks that have been used to explain and describe well-being that I find are really not that helpful whereas burnout as a concept is actually incredibly concrete and very well-researched and it's something that just really appeals to the more evidence-based part of me.

So what is burnout then? Well, burnout is an occupational condition that's recognized by the World Health Organization and it results from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Now, burnout is a word that's bandied about a lot connected with our personal lives but actually, the World Health Organization only recognizes it as an occupational condition. In Scandinavia, it is actually recognized as a medical diagnosis but in the rest of the world it isn't. And we know that it's characterized by three dimensions and all three of these dimensions need to be present for it to be considered a burnout. So what we have is exhaustion. So that's not just your normal tiredness. That's feeling exhausted even after you've had a good night's sleep, you know, chronically and that's certainly the most common dimension that we would see in educators. I think the one that's the most interesting and the way in which we can distinguish a difference between just experiencing exhaustion and possibly moving towards burnout is detachment cynicism.

This is where we start to feel disconnected from our work. We may feel disconnected from our colleagues, disconnected from the purpose of what we're doing, disconnected from the organization, the school as an organization or the education system or even disconnected from our students. And once that happens, it's very hard to come back. Now, for those of you who are familiar with my work and may have read my book, you'll know that I experienced a burnout myself in 2019. In fact, it was five years ago this month, and detachment cynicism was the way in which I first started to realize something was wrong because I didn't believe in what we were doing as a school anymore. And I didn't believe that the things that we were putting in place were actually beneficial for students. And that was a way that I understood that actually things were quite serious. And then the third dimension is what's called reduced professional effectiveness. Now, you may or may not be ineffective but the point is that you feel ineffective and when all three of these dimensions are in place, then we have reached burnout.

Now, burnout is not just an on-off, it's a continuum. And what's interesting about this continuum is that we all are on it, all employees anywhere in the world, in any job are on this burnout continuum. Hopefully, we start our career at the engagement end where we're not exhausted, we're not detached and cynical, and we feel effective in our work. But during the course of a career, and sometimes even during the course of a year, we move up and down this continuum depending on the demands of our work and our capacity to cope with those demands at any given time. It's important for us to understand this. It's also important for us to understand what the signs and symptoms of burnout are so that we can recognize where we are on this continuum because the truth is the continuum is not a one-way street. If we understand what's happening to us and we start to move towards the burnout end, there are steps that we can take and there are also steps that our school can help us with to help bring us back towards engagement and what we really want.

If we think back to that first slide about healthy employees is to have as many people in our school at this engagement end of the continuum as often as possible. So I want to think now, remember what we're looking at is why does this matter? Why is educator wellbeing and burnout important? Let's look at the impact of burnout and I'm going to start by looking at the impact of burnout on novice teachers. So those are people that are new to the profession in their first three years. And what the research shows there, is that those teachers new to the profession are much more likely than veterans to be at that engaged engagement end but increasing numbers are reaching burnout within the first three years. What we know about them is they commonly do not take sick leave but they address their problems instead by just grinding it out, working harder to overcome the issues that they face. And what we're seeing worldwide is that nearly 25% of them have left their job or have left the profession completely by the end of those three years.

So obviously that's something we want to avoid. We want to keep those novice teachers in the profession. What about veteran teachers then? Veteran teachers are much more likely to have reached burnout. They're more likely to take sick leave to help them to manage their stress. They may take longer-term plans to leave the profession but this is the thing that we need to be concerned about. If they've already been in the profession for ten-plus years, they're much more likely to stay in the profession. So where those novice teachers are leaving, veteran teachers are staying, and this is going to give us cause for concern because, you know, I'm sure you've figured it out already. What we're going to have then is a lot of teachers who are close to burnout or already burnt out working in our schools with our students. Why should we be concerned about that? Well, we have some amazing research now coming from York University in the UK going back to 2021, that for the first time was able to connect the burnout of teachers with the well-being and outcomes of students.

And what we know is that pupils or students who are taught by teachers who are experiencing burnout have poorer outcomes. I said that slowly, just to kind of let that sink in, the kind of, you know, enormity of that. What we know is that if a student is taught by a teacher who is experiencing burnout, they're likely to be less motivated. They're likely to be less engaged in their learning. And also very interesting, they have higher stress indicators including higher levels of cortisol. We also know that they have poorer academic outcomes. So really, really important reasons there why we need to take teacher and principal burnout seriously. Because if we are passionate about our work to such an extent that we really don't care enough about ourselves or our families and close friends, but we're really very focused on doing the best for our students. The best thing we can do for our students is to remain at that engagement end of the burnout continuum for as much as possible. A lot of the work that I do in schools now is actually really directly connected with the quality of the workplace culture.

And I'll talk about that a bit more later because we know that this has a huge impact on wellbeing. And what we know is that stressed educators are more likely to experience negative feelings towards their work. And what we know from psychological theory called contagion theory is that our emotions are contagious. So if we come into school with negative feelings, those will rub off on others around us, adults and children. And what we know with leaders is it's more so in the leader-follower relationship. So if we're coming in exhausted and feeling negative and detached from our work as a principal, it will rub off on our teachers. We also know that stressed educators are more likely to engage in uncivil behaviour towards their colleagues and that can have a huge impact on workplace culture. And I talk about this more in my book, but for those of you who are interested, Christine Porath is the foremost researcher in the world into incivility in the workplace. And there are some great YouTube videos you can watch of her speaking about the impact that this has.

So we're going to go into our first question time, Kendra. I think we've probably got about 7 or 8 minutes there for questions. If people have any questions about that first section.

KENDRA PARKER:
Thanks, Helen. We haven't had any questions in the chat as yet, but happy if anyone wants to put their hand up. Sorry, I've just got someone behind me who just distracted me. Someone wants to put their hand up or to just unmute and ask a question. We've got some great stuff that's been covered already. Did someone jump in then?

DR HELEN KELLY:
I heard someone speak.

KENDRA PARKER:
I was just reflecting, myself, on.... the term, this, you know, the terminology around an occupational condition. I think that's such a nice, affirming way to think about burnout, that it's not on you personally. It's something that's happened as a result of the work that you do. And I know I have several colleagues across the system who are experiencing burnout and who are feeling like, you know, it's on their shoulders and really wondering, you know, what they did to get to that point. So, I think to really recognize that is so important.

DR HELEN KELLY:
I completely agree, Kendra. I mean, I'll talk a little bit more about this in the next session, actually. But you're absolutely right. I mean, the research all shows that burnout is connected with the work environment, not connected with the individual. And while there are some personality types that are more likely to burn out than others, I think it's really quite unhelpful to focus upon that. It is a condition of the context and a condition of the workplace, and I'll talk in a few minutes about how it's connected with a mismatch between what the individual needs and what the workplace provides. You know, I think if there are no questions, it's also important at this point, you know, when we're thinking about why does this matter, to think about the impact on the individual of experiencing burnout. And I know about this firsthand because it happened to me, but also having, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people reach out to me every year and many, many people who've experienced burnout themselves.

And what the research shows is that burnout takes about three years to recover from. I can certainly share that. I remember it being around three years when I woke up one morning and thought, I don't feel broken anymore. And what we also know is that it's extremely difficult to recover from burnout while you are still working in your job, in the same workplace. And so, you know, when we were talking yesterday, Kendra, I described it as a very slow burn, you know, a slow lead-up that can be a decade in the making. But at the end, it's like falling off a cliff. And once it happens, you have no control over it. It happens so fast, and there's no going back. So, you know, I had to give up my career ten years early. I had to retire at 55 as a result of this.

KENDRA PARKER:
Yeah.

DR HELEN KELLY:
So it's something that not only are we thinking about this in the context of us being effective educators, but just thinking about the very serious consequences of actually reaching that point of burnout on the continuum.

KENDRA PARKER:
Yeah. And I think just to have those, the three conditions around occupational - around burnout I really liked, I know exhaustion, but then that detachment cynicism. So, I know I feel that I get to that point and that I often say to myself, right, you need to stop for a while because you're becoming cynical about what's happening. (CROSSTALK). But yeah. So, it's really nice to have that reflection. There are some questions that have come into the chat now, Helen, so I might just share a couple of them. Oh, they're coming thick and fast. Fantastic. The first question, Jessica says, I wonder what the solution is for principals being in charge of organisational wellbeing when they themselves are burnt out.

DR HELEN KELLY:
Yeah. Well, this is an issue that I see in schools all the time, and I think it's about being bold enough to recognise what's happening to you and to take steps because, you know, one of the things that I find is unhelpful is that we've moved away from this idea that the charismatic leader is the desirable way to lead, and we've moved towards this idea that servant leadership is actually now the model of leadership for the 21st century. And the problem with that is, it does place our principals at significant risk that they're abnegating their own needs for the needs of their community. And so, I think we have to go back to seeing self-care as a core leadership attribute. And again, I'm saying that slowly for emphasis because I think it's, you know, an aha moment, you know? That business of, you know, you can't put on your own oxygen mask. You can't help others if you haven't put your own oxygen mask on. So, I think it's about it cascading down the organisation. And when I work with schools or groups of schools, we start with leader well-being first, and we have some tools to enable us to evaluate the well-being of the leadership team.

And then, we develop a strategy to improve the well-being of the leadership team first and lead, you know, as far as I'm concerned, that well-being then cascades down the organisation from leaders to teachers, from teachers to students. Yeah.

KENDRA PARKER:
Mhm. And we were just reflecting, the principals and residents here this morning talking about your webinar coming up that a few of us said, you know, we don't know how well we actually modelled that when we were in schools as well, the well-being. There's another question here in regards to the continuum. If you get up to one point but then get some relief, e.g., you have some holidays or something, can you go back to the start of the continuum or do you tend to... is it, you know...

DR HELEN KELLY:
It's different for everyone, you know? What I'm going to do in the final part of the session is, we're going to talk about work recovery, and we're going to talk about the holidays. But I mean, the research shows that the benefit of a vacation lasts about three weeks. So, there's your answer, really. You might briefly, you know, experience some respite and you might move back slightly. But if actually, you know, you're getting close towards that burnout end, it's going to have a significant impact. And actually, what happened to me was, I became unwell and, you know, was then in discussions with a psychologist and my GP realised I'd burnt out. I wasn't able to go back to school for the last three weeks of the school year and then had a week's holiday. So, I had nine weeks off and I thought that would be enough. I went back to school and on the second day back, I had a panic attack in my office. I'd never had a panic attack in my life. I'm not a kind of hysterical kind of person, so that just shows that for me, a nine-week holiday, it didn't scratch the surface.

KENDRA PARKER:
Yeah, (INAUDIBLE). There is another question here. How do you avoid burnout as a principal when you're trying so hard to prevent it for your staff? I think we had a chat about this last night as well, Helen.

DR HELEN KELLY:
Yeah. I mean, the same answer really is that you absolutely need to put yourself first. But, you know, buy my book. Borrow my book. Read my book, you know? I think that that explains to you all the - first of all, how we arrived here in this situation for principals where wellbeing is so poor and what factors have impacted over the last five decades, and then the impact that that has on the school system and on us as individuals and then how we put that right. And there are a whole bunch of strategies in there, right from things that can be done at an organisational level right through to things that can be done at an individual level, some of which we'll touch on today, but we don't have time to touch on them all. But really, it is about having to put yourself first because, you know, if you are not in a position to take care of your own well-being, then you're not going to be able to take care of the well-being of others. And unfortunately, what I've learned since I've been doing this work as a consultant over the last four years is that most principals are not anywhere near as interested in principal well-being as they should be, and most of my work is in schools looking at the whole community rather than really working with principals, and that's where it should start.

I can't emphasise that enough.

KENDRA PARKER:
Mhm. Thanks, Helen. Really good. One, we've got time for one more question. (CROSSTALK). Heidi has asked, how do we assist people with the contagious negative feelings towards work? What are the best things to do or say?

DR HELEN KELLY:
Well, there's a couple of things there. Most of the work that I do now is going into schools and evaluating the quality of the workplace culture through surveys and focus groups, and then taking steps to actually address the issues that people are feeling negative about. And that's kind of bold work. It's quite confronting. It's a little bit like doing a 360 in a way. So, that's one way. It's, find out why are people feeling so negative, and are there things that we can do to actually improve the quality of the culture or the workload that will actually relieve that. The second thing is building into the culture, this courageous conversations approach where we're prepared to have courageous conversations. And, you know, some of the training I do in schools is, how do we have them? How do we plan for them and prepare for them and practice having them so that we can address these issues with individuals who are very negative? Another way is to collaboratively develop with schools cultural norms.

I'll talk about this a bit more later, that staff develop together so that we understand how we behave in a professional workplace towards each other, and then we have something to hold each other accountable to.

KENDRA PARKER:
Thanks, Helen. I think we need to move on, but really great advice there. Those courageous conversations are so important and we do have a course for that. (LAUGHS).

DR HELEN KELLY:
Brilliant. You know, what I'm seeing (CROSSTALK) is that we start off with senior leaders and middle leaders. But in many schools now, I'm delivering these workshops on courageous conversations to the whole staff so that they can actually, you know, say what, you know... the behaviour that you exhibited yesterday upset me and the reasons why, and then we can resolve our issues.

KENDRA PARKER:
Yeah. Great. And if you had a question I didn't get to, I apologise, but we'll try and get to them next time.

DR HELEN KELLY:
Yeah, we will. So let's look then at the signs and causes of burnout. So, the signs, first of all, so that we can understand where we are on that burnout continuum and a couple of tools that can help us to identify it in others that I've found very useful with my own staff when I was a principal. So, what are the signs of exhaustion then? Well, physical symptoms, you know? This is where I started because actually, I started experiencing chest pain when I was at rest in the evenings. And my father died of heart disease when he was exactly the age that I was when this happened to me. And so, I was ultra-cautious and I went to see a cardiologist in Hong Kong and found that I had severe blockages in my arteries. So, you know, physical symptoms. Shortness of breath, dizziness, being ill more often than you are, chronic fatigue or problems with sleeping, you know, insomnia. In my book, there's a whole section about sleep which I don't really have any time to talk about today. Increased anxiety, so feeling tense, irritable, feeling worried, edginess.

I remember that I used to have this feeling of being hunted all the time, that I could never quite relax, even when I was at home at weekends, because I always thought there was something that I should be doing or somebody wanted something from me. And I realised now that that was very unhealthy. Experiencing depressive symptoms, so feeling hopeless, guilty, worthless, sad. Impaired focus, so poor concentration, noticing, you know, one of the things that happened to me in - I was 55 when I realized I was burned out, but from the age of about 48-49 onwards, I was going through the menopause. And you know, that overlaid over this, you know, over this exhaustion. It had a massive impact on me, and that impaired focus, that crashing fatigue that you experience. And I'm sure there might be some women out there who know what I'm talking about. At the end of the day where you just have complete brain mush and you can't take in any more. The tale here that will help you to identify this in your colleagues and in your staff is a lack of self-care.

If someone who's normally looked after themselves really well, comes to school looking pristine, and suddenly is coming with unwashed hair, you know, and clothes that are unironed or, you know, that kind of thing. I've used this a couple of times with people on my staff to realise that something is not quite right. And then, we look at signs of detachment/cynicism, so those negative feelings about the workplace. What happened to me? I was working in the private sector in Hong Kong with some of the, you know, wealthiest parents in the world. And I suddenly realised that what the parents wanted us to do for these students, where we were cracking an academic whip to get them into the top universities in the US, was us - I never really believed in that, but it got to a point where it became overwhelming that I felt that what we were doing was actually harmful to the students, and I no longer had that sense of purpose around my work. And once that came thick and fast, that was the end, you know?

So, feeling disillusioned, that you're not making a difference. Feeling disconnected, so I'll talk about values a bit in the next section, but feeling that you don't have things in common, you know, you don't have the same values as the people that you're working with or with the parents that you're working for. If you previously enjoyed your work and had loads of enthusiasm, not feeling as enthusiastic about your work and enjoying it as much as you did, it just being a grind. Making plans to leave. So, you know, sitting at your desk when you have a moment and just fantasising about what it will be like when I don't work here anymore. Or seeking isolation. And again, this is a tale, you know. It's a tale for others if during their preparation periods. I'm not sure what you call them in Australia. We call it PPA in the UK. Closing the door and not interacting with colleagues. And again, for principals, you know, this is a big tale. Not walking around the corridors, not going into the classrooms, but actually keeping that door closed.

And then, signs of feeling or being ineffective. Being poorly motivated when you've normally been very motivated and being unenthusiastic. Or the opposite, and this is another tale. Preoccupation with work. So, I can think of a couple of people that I've worked with in the past who I've suddenly realized are staying at school very, very late and have become obsessed because they're feeling ineffective and they're working harder than they've worked before in order to try to make up for that. Failing to take recovery time, you know, is part of that. So, just grinding it out, working both days at the weekends, working through a lot of the holidays. Feeling that you're less productive. You're not, you know, you're working hard, but you're not achieving as much. And also, poor performance. And for teachers, the best way to identify this is suddenly starting to struggle with behaviour management in the classroom when they haven't had problems with behaviour management before. And that's another tale, you know, that I've seen in colleagues.

So, what are the causes of burnout then? Because if we're going to address this in our schools, we need to understand what it's all about. And as Kendra mentioned earlier, really, burnout is not a problem of people so much as it is of the social environment in which they work. Christina Maslach is one of the foremost researchers in the world into burnout, and she said that what she's discovered is that when the workplace doesn't recognise the human side of the work and there are major mismatches between the nature of the job and the nature of the people, then there will be a greater risk of burnout. So, what we're talking about is an environmental risk. And actually, there's some great work coming out of Australia talking about this as being psychosocial risk factors that we really need to take into account in the same way as we do other health and safety risk factors in the workplace. And if we could just start to think about wellbeing at work in schools as being around these psychosocial risk factors, we could depersonalise and take the shame away from, you know, all of this.

Unfortunately, we're not there yet. So, what I'm going to talk about in the next two sections are these factors that contribute to burnout. We have work demands on the one side and we have work recovery on the other. And I like to think of this, and this is not substantiated by evidence-based research beyond my own, is that work demands probably no less than 80% and work recovery 20% maximum. So, the bulk of what we're looking at is burnout is caused by those work demands. And you can see six demands there that I'm going to work through. So workload, community control, rewards, values and fairness. These are the factors that contribute to burnout. So, if we want to turn that around to be positive, if we want to try to address burnout in our schools, if we want to improve the quality of the well-being of staff in schools, these are the factors that we need to look at. So, we will come on to work recovery in the third section. So, let's look at these each in turn. The first one won't surprise you to know.

It's workload. If we want to maximise the quality of workplace well-being and keep people at that engagement end of the continuum, we need to make sure that their workload is manageable. It is, for teachers, the single biggest driver of workplace well-being. And although the research shows that actually it's the second biggest driver for principals, my own research in schools, which is quite extensive over the last four or five years, doesn't bear that out. My own research shows workload is also the biggest factor for principals. What we're talking about there is not just the volume of the work, so the amount of stuff that we have to do every day, which includes the pace of the day, but it also includes, often overlooked, the emotional demands of the work. And actually, this is where my interest in this field began way back in 2012. I was looking at, actually, what are these emotional demands that we're experiencing on a daily basis through the relationships and interactions that we're having with our students, with our parents, with our colleagues, and the impact that that's having on us.

And there's - I chose this to be the first main chapter of my book because I think this is the most important thing that we need to be looking at. So, if we want to address this, we need to be looking not only at reducing the volume of the work but also at how we support people with the emotional demands. The quality of the community is the second biggest driver of well-being in the workplace. And if the quality of the community is not there, it's going to drive us along that burnout continuum. So, we're looking at the quality of our collegial relationships and our parent relationships and the amount of support we have. And yes, of course, student relationships are important here, but the research shows, particularly for principals, that it is the quality of the adult relationships in the workplace that actually creates a situation where burnout might be occurring. And what I know from my work in schools over the last three years around workplace culture is that the quality of the community is what protects teachers against burnout.

And when the quality, that camaraderie and the quality of the collegial relationships erodes over time, that protective factor goes, and then teachers are more vulnerable to burnout. Control. We need to have autonomy over how we do our work. We need to have autonomy in the classroom. We need to have involvement in change, so top-down approaches to change leadership can be very damaging as far as well-being is concerned. And we need to have as much as possible a high level of at least consultation, but better still, collaboration in decision-making and problem-solving between leadership and teachers. And we're not just talking about teachers here. We're talking about teaching assistants under the staff that work in schools. I've often found that in administration teams, you know, those who work in the offices or in the buildings, there's a high level of micromanagement. Values. This comes back to our detachment/cynicism. It's really important, the research, shows that our values match the values of the organisation that we work for.

They match the values of our colleagues, parents and students. And if there's a mismatch between what we think is important in life and what they think is important, that can be a factor that sends us along that continuum, and that's exactly what I described in relation to my work at my last school where I was a principal. We also know that people do not want to see unethical behaviour, and particularly for those people who have very high levels of integrity. Observing unethical behaviour by those around them can be a factor that can send them along that burnout continuum.

HELEN KELLY:
And then finally, no, not finally, two more left. Rewards. Rewards is a huge thing, isn't it? When we think of rewards, we all think of money, but actually, it isn't just about money. We know that rewards can be extrinsic and they can be intrinsic. Extrinsic rewards can be financial, so if we don't feel that we're being paid as much, especially if we find out that someone else is being paid more than us, that can be a factor. But also validation and status are other extrinsic rewards that actually drive our motivation and drive our workplace well-being. And if we think that we're not being recognised for the value of the work that we do, or that we don't have the status that we deserve, this can be a huge factor. Recognition and appreciation is one of the areas that I'm working with many schools on at the moment. But also, especially for educators, we're very driven by our intrinsic rewards. Let's face it, most of us don't do the work for the money, do we? We're driven by that inward sense of wanting to make a difference by our values.

I know that I was, but we might also be driven by the challenge that education provides, the opportunities for growth and again that camaraderie. And so if we're finding that within our workplace, we're not feeling that we're making a difference, or we don't have opportunities for challenge because we've been passed over for promotion, for example. We don't feel that we're growing because we're not being provided with professional development opportunities, or the community has eroded and that camaraderie has gone. Those are all factors that can cause us to move along the burnout continuum, and you'd be surprised just how big a factor this is. I see it in schools almost every day. And then finally, fairness. In order to maximise the wellbeing of individuals in the workplace, people need to feel that they've been treated fairly. What that really looks like is when we go into work, the research shows, we actually form a social contract where we are prepared to give our services and in return, we expect to be treated well by our organisation.

And if we feel we're not being treated well, and we're not being treated fairly, that can have a huge impact on our wellbeing. So, fairness around salaries and benefits, feeling that we've received the promotion that we deserve, feeling that we've been fairly appraised or evaluated, feeling that the resources and workload are distributed fairly among the team or between teams, and also feeling that there's an absence of favouritism. Favouritism can be, you know, for principals, this is a tricky one. You know, you want to try to build relationships in school, and it's very, very easy for you to be vulnerable to accusations of favouritism. It's happened to me. So, if we think about that list of six, the first one being workload, but the other five actually pertain to workplace culture. So, what I've developed is this three-part model, and I very much like three-part models, and I also like alliteration, and they all begin with a W. So, the determinants of workplace wellbeing are workload, workplace culture and work recovery, and certainly work recovery is the smallest cog.

Workplace culture is a much, much bigger cog than you would possibly imagine in my experience. Obviously, we're never going to detract from the importance of workload, but don't feel that it's all about workload. Workplace culture is really, really important. When I talk about workplace culture, what I mean are these four things. People need to have a sense of belonging to the workplace. They need to feel accepted and included. They need to feel that they have shared values and that there's a shared sense of purpose. There need to be positive collegial relationships. People need to feel that they're respected, that there is civility and there is trust. When you ask teachers, what is it they want from their relationships in the workplace, the first thing they almost always say is respect. And it's about unpacking what behaviours actually show respect. Also, recognition and appreciation for the contribution. Lots of fascinating things that I've learned over the last three or four years around that, which I wish I'd known when I was a principal.

And then the final one is psychological safety. People need to feel that they are safe to ask questions or admit mistakes without fear of judgment and that they can take risks. So this isn't a workshop about positive workplace culture, but I thought it would be useful to touch on what exactly is it that I mean by this, because this does have a huge impact on the quality of wellbeing in the workplace. So I'm gonna move on to the section now. What can school leaders do to prevent educator burnout? Well, the truth is, while I will give you some tips based upon what I've learned, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to workplace wellbeing. I can't just give you a list of things and say, go off and do those and everything will be fine. If only I could, but it doesn't work that way. What you need to do is take a strategic approach to find out what's going on in your school so that you make sure that the energy that's directed into this and the money and other resources that are directed into this are well used.

They are targeted effectively and that anything that you do is actually going to be effective. So I've developed this six-part model workplace wellbeing framework and I'm just gonna talk you through it quickly and then you have an opportunity to ask me questions about this. So I always recommend the first thing you do is form a wellbeing team. These things are much more effective if they're collaborative and not just something that leadership does to the staff. So those wellbeing teams should be formed from representatives of all roles within the school, both the administration, the building staff, teaching assistants, teachers at different levels and experience and different grade levels or year groups and people from leadership. You then need to educate stakeholders. That's what I'm doing now for you. So it's providing education for stakeholders at all levels around why workplace wellbeing is important for the teachers and adults in the building and how we can address this. And I've worked not only with educators but also with parents and in some schools work with students to educate them around this.

Then the most important, collecting and analysing data. Lots and lots of schools these days do surveys on teacher wellbeing and then they don't do anything with the data. They often don't know how to use the data. One of the things I do is collect data, but I also go into schools and help them to use the data that they've already got through surveys that are put together, not just around wellbeing, but also around the workplace culture. And then also focus groups or in smaller teams and smaller schools, individual short one-to-one listening sessions. If people don't feel comfortable to speak within a group to find out what's going on, what needs fixing and also what's already working well that we can build on. Once we've got all that data, then we need to establish priorities and set goals and we need to design and implement interventions and I'll talk about that a little bit in a minute. And then it's really important, of course, with any process like this, that we have things in place to enable us to track and review progress.

So it really isn't as simple as just thinking, oh, well, we'll put on some keep fit opportunities for them on a Wednesday afternoon and we'll bring muffins on Fridays. All of these things are nice, but the way to actually have a real impact on the wellbeing of staff is for principals to take a strategic approach. And, you know, I know that might sound quite overwhelming and unwieldy, but the truth is it works and it's something that can only happen over time. So when we talk about interventions, there are three levels of intervention and the most important are primary interventions. These are the interventions that we can put in place that actually help to reduce stress. So they're focused upon that context on that environment that we've already talked about. So we're addressing the root cause of the stress at the school level. Obviously, there's a level above that, there's the governmental level, but often we do not have control over that. And what I'm talking about at the moment is what can principals do.

The second level is secondary interventions. This is where we're providing staff with information and support to enable them to manage their stress more effectively. And when we talk about work recovery in the third section, we'll talk about that a bit more. And then tertiary interventions. So this is remedial support for those individuals who are already unwell and probably off work. And in most schools that will be dealt with by HR, but in some schools that will also be dealt with by principals. So although I'm not going to give you a cheat sheet of things that you can do, these are some of the things that I've learned. If we start down at 7:00, the thing that people go to most readily is reviewing and addressing workloads. Yes, of course, but often there's not as much that we can do about that as we'd like to. But that's a common intervention. Providing training on mental health and wellbeing. So we're looking at that secondary intervention. But all of those are the things on my graphic, all relate to the quality of the workplace culture.

And these are the kinds of interventions that I've been helping schools to implement, looking at their mission, vision and values. So how do we create that sense of belonging and sense of shared purpose for our staff? Establishing those cultural norms that we can be held accountable to, how we behave and conduct ourselves so that collegial relationships are positive. Providing compassionate leadership training so that leaders at all levels know how to get the most out of their colleagues. Building community. So all kinds of initiatives to ensure that we're still providing opportunities for staff to come together, to get to know each other, to seek support. And one of the things I've learned, you know, probably the most important thing I've learned over the last four years is that these opportunities are slowly eroding in schools. And as a consequence, the community and camaraderie and the support that we received, the sucker that we received from that is being eroded. Increasing those collaborative and consultation kind of relationships between leadership and staff so that there's less top-down approaches.

Improving the quality of appraisal and evaluation so people feel cared for through that process, feel that they're known, feel that their professional development matters and feel that they're being treated fairly. So that's just an idea of some common interventions that I've been working on over the last three or four years with schools. So we're gonna go into question time too now. We've probably got about five minutes here. I will try to talk through the last section so that we have time for more questions.

KENDRA PARKER:
Thanks, Helen. We've actually had a few questions come in around this section, which is terrific. But just going back earlier, Georgia noticed on one of your earlier slides around the reasons for leaving the profession to do with rewards and recognition. So I think you just covered that in that section. So, Georgia, apologies, I missed that before, but hopefully that's now been covered for you. There's a personal question here that I might bring to come back to at the end that Melanie's asked about your work, Helen. So we might do that at the end of the session.

HELEN KELLY:
OK.

KENDRA PARKER:
Someone, Georgia again, read the slide, signs of detachment for staff seeking isolation. Is it better to support them to access some isolation, e.g independent workspace for part of the day? Is that one way, a strategy for dealing with that?

HELEN KELLY:
Again, it's about the individual, so I think it's having those skills to be able to open up a conversation. You know, and that's one of the things that all principals should be provided with is training around how to have these conversations, which is often something that's missing from principal training. So knowing how to raise this subject and then really finding out what it is the individual wants. So the worst thing that a principal can do in any of these situations is presume that they know. Don't presume you know anything around this. Broach the subject, find out, ask, and then provide whatever it is the individual needs.

KENDRA PARKER:
Thanks, Helen. Great. And I'm really pleased that here at the Academy last year, all our managers got trained in mental health first aid, which is a really terrific program for any school leaders on here who influenced that.

HELEN KELLY:
It came from Australia originally, and now it's gone all over the world. So it's a huge contribution that Australia has made actually to this field.

KENDRA PARKER:
Yeah, really helps you in understanding how to, you know, thinking about how to support people. Another question, this is a comment, but I think it's probably one that's on everybody's mind, particularly when we look at the number one issue around the work demands is around workloads. Linda made the comment, it's very hard to do as in reduce, I'm assuming she means reduce the workload as a school when pressures are put on us from above.

HELEN KELLY:
Absolutely.

KENDRA PARKER:
I'd like to comment on that.

HELEN KELLY:
Absolutely. I mean, a lot of the schools that I work with at the moment are in the state sector in the UK, and, you know, we obviously, experience this, there's less flexibility. However, I think that this is about again, collaboration with staff because staff have great ideas, you know, we think as principles, we should have all the ideas, but figuring out what's going on with the workload and drawing ideas from staff about small changes, tweaks that can be made. And never think that just because it's a tiny change, it's not going to have an impact. A tiny change, if you can give somebody an extra 30 minutes a week, that can have a massive impact. I'm also gonna talk in the third section about the importance of breaks. One of the most important things that I've seen happening in schools that are working in the state sector, in particular, is lots of individuals not being able to take breaks at all during the day and finding ways in which people can have cover so that they can get a break is really important.

So don't put, my answer there is don't presume that small things are not going to be impactful. Anything you can do to reduce someone's workload is going to have an impact.

KENDRA PARKER:
Thanks, Helen. I read of a school recently that is trialling, a government school in Victoria, it's trialling, giving their teaching staff half a day at home to work from home, blocking some time for them to have that experience. Yeah.

HELEN KELLY:
No, it's not very often before I move on to the next section, it's not very often that I would ever highlight the things the UK government are doing because they're pretty hopeless. But actually a few years ago, they did put in place the Workload Reduction Toolkit, which you can find online, and it's available in the public domain. And I think that that's quite a useful framework for thinking about workload reduction in schools. And I know that schools in other countries and schools I'm working with have used that. So I'm gonna move on now, Kendra, if that's okay.

KENDRA PARKER:
Sure, there's a few more questions and comments, but we'll hopefully come back to them at the end. Thanks.

HELEN KELLY:
We will. So let's look at what individuals can do to help prevent burnout then. Remember, we had that graphic with work demands on one side and work recovery on the other, and work recovery is a small percentage, most of its work demands. But, you know, often the only thing we have at our disposal is what's under our control? What can we do as individuals to help ameliorate the impact of what's happening at work? So there's what's called the Work Recovery Framework. I called it that, but it actually isn't my work. This is the work again of a bunch of researchers from Germany who have been working on this for the last couple of decades. And what they found is that in order to recover most effectively from our work in non-work time, we need to be experiencing these four work recovery experiences frequently and regularly. Now, the one I'm going to talk about today is by far the most important. It's psychological detachment, which means we are fully disengaging from our work in our non-work time, and I'll unpack that a bit more.

The next one is relaxation. I think we all understand what that is. You know, it's an emotional state of non-arousal control. Just as we need to have control over how we operate in the workplace, we need to have control over how we spend our non-work time. And for parents or people who are caring for the elderly or others in their community, that can be difficult. And then the final one, which people find the most surprising, is mastery experiences. We need to be experiencing a sense of accomplishment and achievement around something that is not connected with our work. And really, all of these things are about moving from a state where we are experiencing our stress hormones of cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline to a situation where our body is activating our happy hormones, whether that be oxytocin or dopamine or serotonin or endorphins. And mastery experiences actually do trigger our dopamine system, you know, the reward system. So, engaging in hobbies and things that get progressively more challenging, which are not connected with our work, are really important.

And I know that that's something that we often don't have time for because we're exhausted. So, I say regularly and frequently, I touched on this earlier, what the research shows is that the benefit of the holiday lasts on average between two to three weeks, regardless of how long the holiday is. The benefit of the weekend lasts until about Tuesday. So, what this means is that the temptation in schools to push through to the holidays, this is very bad for us. And the temptation to push through to the weekend, also bad for us. We need to be taking time to take care of ourselves in the evenings regularly and frequently, at least two or three evenings a week. And we need to take at least one full day of the weekend without any connection. I do talk later about the workplace and the benefits of micro breaks, but we need to be taking breaks during the working day as well. I'm just gonna say that again. We need to be taking breaks during the working day. This is something that we're very bad at, especially as principals.

Let's look in more detail then at psychological detachment, because this is the most important of the four. What we know is that there are barriers to psychological detachment, constant accessibility. We were talking as we were waiting for you all to come in about dings on your phone. And what we found over the last decade or more is that the increase of availability through WhatsApp groups or texting or any kind of chats or other ways that we connect with each other through social media over recent decades is actually hampering our ability to be able to psychologically detach from our work when we're at home. Work-related rumination, so that's thinking about work and things that have happened during the school day, especially if there's been conflict and I will touch on that again briefly. Self-sabotage behaviours, so there's a whole chapter of my book on this if you're interested. Things that cause us to push ourselves too hard and work on through our non-work time, whether we're seeking validation, whether we have imposter syndrome and we're worried of being found out, so we work too hard.

Whether we're a people pleaser and we don't know how to say no, all kinds of things will actually be a barrier to us switching off. We know that if we work long hours, it makes it harder to switch off when we actually get home. If we work in intense working conditions, so we're working with a lot of students who have mental health issues or special educational needs, or there's a toxic work environment, also barrier and poor homework boundaries, which I'm going to talk about in a few minutes. All of these things are preventing us from switching off. Work-related rumination is important. We know that if we have a conflict during the day with someone, that actually the impact of us thinking about it over and over again when we get home is more damaging to our health than the actual initial conflict. We know that this rumination increases cortisol secretion and impacts our sleep. It also reduces our executive functioning and raises the risk of cardiovascular disease. I do wonder whether that had an impact on me with my cardiovascular disease.

As someone who's slim, hasn't eaten meat for 30 years, exercises well, I was not really the poster child for heart disease, but something went wrong somewhere along the line. So this rumination is something that we need to try to address.

DR. HELLEN KELLY:
So, how do we improve our psychological detachment then? Well, I think there's a whole bunch of emotional factors. And then there's stuff connected to homework boundaries. The emotional factors. When we were talking before you were all let in, someone mentioned about those feelings of guilt that we never feel as educators, that we're doing enough for our students. And we feel that if we take time off in order to look after ourselves, that we feel guilty because we're not doing everything we can for our students. So, we need to reframe those feelings. And I think hopefully the first section of my presentation around why it's important, that educators have maximum wellbeing, hopefully has given you some things to hang that on. Separating our personal and professional identity. What we know from the research is that educators, more than most other professionals have their personal and professional identity very closely intertwined, and it's been able to separate those out. So, Doctor Kelly is not the same thing as Helen.

We're two separate personas with two separate lives. And it's important that I have that. Being able to seek emotional support and schools providing opportunities for people to seek emotional support, you know, with those emotional demands. So, whether that be through collegial support or whether that be through, supervision, you know, many schools now around the world are providing opportunities for supervision in the same way that psychologists or nurses and doctors receive in the health service. So, you have a professional that you can go to to seek emotional support that's becoming more popular. I mean, it isn't cheap. But I'm seeing even state schools in impoverished areas of London actually starting to provide this. And then addressing your own self-sabotage behaviours. So, understanding why is it that I'm working too hard and not taking time for myself and understanding? That was something that I did a lot of work on after I burnt out, and understanding that I was seeking validation for unhealthy reasons that were connected with things that happened to me in my childhood.

And that those things needed to be addressed in order to enable me to move forward and be healthy. And then homework boundaries. I'm gonna look at that in more detail now. So, how do we put homework boundaries in place? Well, first of all, the research shows that actually there are two different kinds of people. There are what we call integrators and what we call separators. Integrators like their home and work to be integrated and separators like them to be separated. But actually, the research shows you won't be surprised to hear that separators have better well-being than integrators. So, as much as you might like to integrate, it's actually much better for you if you separate work and home. So I'm going to give you some tips here of how you can do that. The single most important thing you could do is start the day with non-work thoughts. So, do not start the day by leaning over to the bedside table, picking up the phone, going on to the school email. That's how I used to start my day.

Very unhealthy. So, delay checking those work related emails and messages. Engage in something cognitive like reading, not connected with work, journaling, listening to a podcast, maybe doing some physical exercise even if it's only for five minutes. A bit of stretching. In Hong Kong, my husband always used to run down the hill and run back up the hill again every morning. It only took him ten minutes. It was brutal. It was a steep hill, but it was a great way to start the day. Or if you have relaxation practices that you engage in, do those, you know, whether they be visualizations, meditation, the research shows they're highly, highly effective. The problem is they have the biggest dropout rate of any intervention. So, it's something that I'm loathe to recommend to people that don't already have those practices. But if you have them, start the day with them. Then what about after work? That post work transition? It's about developing a transition routine so that you understand that was work and this is now my time.

And that might not be on the way home from work for you. You know, if you are intending to work a bit more when you get home, but at some point during the evening, there has to be a cut off where you understand that you're transitioning now into a place where you're going to psychologically detach from work. And the research shows that having routines to support that will be very beneficial if you're leaving school or at some point at home during the evening, making a list of the things that you have to do tomorrow. But and this is the important point where you're going to do them, when you're going to do them, and how you're going to do them has been shown to be highly effective. It enables you to switch off. If you're going to not work when you get home. Switching gears during the journey home. So, knowing that I'm going to think about work until I get to the Blue Bridge. And once I've got to the Blue Bridge, I'm going to put on a podcast about something that I love, and then I'm going to not think about work and do that every day.

Very habit forming or having a shower and getting changed when you arrive at home or at some point I'm going to work for an hour, then I'm going to have a shower and get changed into something else. And that's just, you know, these I was saying to Kendra earlier, it's not rocket science. We know these things. The point is that we ignore them. We push them down. Don't ignore the inner voice. Listen to it because it's really smart. What about setting boundaries? We need to be able to set boundaries with others. We need to build friction around technology. That's the first thing. One of the first things I did when I realized I was unwell was I removed all the apps from the phone, and so now I have to go in through the browser to get to my work emails. I have no notifications, so no dinging happening. Some people have told me in schools where I've worked, they even have a different browser for work and home, and some people even have a different computer. You know, so people have ways of building that friction, making your boundaries clear with your supervisors.

So, that could be your principal. Or if you are a principal, that could be the governors or directors or who's ever responsible for running your school. You know, I am gonna take care of my well-being, and I will not be available after this time. And that's bold. But what you can do is dip back into those first few slides of my presentation to help them to understand why this is important for the effectiveness of the school. Resetting expectations with colleagues. You know, I'm sorry. I know it looks like I'm being antisocial, but I'm not gonna be on those WhatsApp chat groups in the evenings where we're gossiping about what happened at work during the day. Because I don't find it's helpful and it's stopping me from switching off and helping them to understand. Or even if it's just two evenings a week, I'm gonna put my phone in the drawer two evenings a week, and you won't be able to contact me. If you're a principal and you have a senior leadership team agreeing and sharing out the evenings, so that everyone can put their phone in the drawer at least one evening a week.

And then having strategies to address that boundary crossing. So, actually practicing saying it out loud, you know, if somebody crosses the boundary and contacts you in the evening, how am I going to address that with them? How am I going to help them to understand that this isn't supportive of my psychological detachment? What about during the working day? This is something we're really bad at. What we know is that without regular breaks, our cognitive resources become depleted. So, it's actually not beneficial for us to just keep grinding it out. We also know that there's something called the default mode network, where when we take a break, the unconscious mind goes into this default mode network and helps us to see new connections and patterns that we cannot see when we're just focused on something. That's why if you take a walk around the block, it often helps you to solve a problem. Or why sometimes we wake up in the middle of the night with aha moment. So, actually helping you to understand why it's important that you take a break.

I think can be supportive of ensuring that you do. The research also shows that breaks help with stress management. They help to decrease exhaustion, and they also decrease the need for a long recovery at the end of the day, if we're able to take breaks during the day. Less than half of educators say that they have sufficient breaks during the day. So, for a principal, ensuring that staff can take breaks is probably the single most effective and simple thing that you can do to support their well-being. What we know is we can take micro breaks and a whole bunch of research around this, of as little as 40s can actually be an effective way to psychologically detach. And if we take multiple micro breaks of 40s every day, that can have a big impact on our wellbeing. It might just be looking out of the window like I'm doing now at the beautiful blue sky for 40s. That's all it takes. Do that several times a day. It will be beneficial. So, what I'm going to do now is we'll have this as our final question time.

And then I'll just wrap up with the main learnings from the session. (UNKNOWN).

KENDRA PARKER:
Thanks, Helen. That was great. I've got lots of notes down here myself, and can really relate to them rumination. (CROSSTALK). When I was a school leader and even in the work I do now, there are a few questions that have come in. Just gonna jump to one. Excuse me for one second, from Jessica, who said, (CROSSTALK). Just wondering how many cycles of burnout is healthy if there is? And what do, you know, if you see someone going through that cycle more than once?

DR. HELLEN KELLY:
Yeah. I don't think there's a whole bunch of research on this. What we do know is that if someone continues, you know, if someone's able to recover and then goes back to their previous job and their previous behaviors, then they are likely to burn out again. We know that. I'm not aware of any research that tells us how many cycles you know, no cycles are healthy. You know, this can have an impact on you for the rest of your life. In some shape or form. I'm now doing this work, which I love, and I have a wonderful life, which I'm extremely grateful for. But I had to cut my career, you know, early by ten years. And, you know, and my earning capacity (CROSSTALK) fortunately, I don't have children to provide for, but, you know, so I think no one wants to experience one burnout, let alone think about experiencing cycles of burnout.

KENDRA PARKER:
Thanks, Helen. That's so true, isn't it? You know, and so what's causing it to keep happening if that's a cycle that someone's in? You've really got to look deeply at that. (CROSSTALK).

DR. HELLEN KELLY:
So, just very briefly on that, Kendra, again, there's a chapter towards the end of my (CROSSTALK) where I talk about recovering from burnout. And what the research shows is that, if someone has actually burnt out, really they need to come away from the workplace, that's the first thing. Secondly, there needs to be a period of physical recovery where you're just taking care of yourself (CROOSTALK) you're reflecting. And then the third stage would then be seeking psychological support. So, actually to go into therapy too quickly, they show is not helpful. You need to take care of yourself physically first and then seek help from a counsellor or a therapist, because that Kendra is what's going to help you to identify the behaviours. And, you know, the things that were happening within the workplace, that can help to prevent it happening again. (CROSSTALK), so that you're able to then look at this workplace and think, this workplace is not healthy for me. I need to go and work somewhere else or this role is not healthy for me.

I need to take a step down or whatever.

KENDRA PARKER:
Yeah. Great. Thank you. There's a comment on here, which is so true of what happens here at the academy as well. And I've sort of lost it trying to find it, but somebody said, at my school, we have email and teams and constantly getting messages. I think you talked a bit about that Helen, with turning off your app. So now, as a school principal myself, we brought in, you know, through Covid particularly. But even before that, the school that I got to had, I've forgotten the name of the app, but I'd never used it with my school before. And I said, that's the first thing we did is get rid of that, that teachers parents could message 24 hours a day on this like, chat feature. (CROSSTALK).

DR. HELLEN KELLY:
No no no no no no. I mean.

KENDRA PARKER:
Putting those boundaries in. Yeah.

DR. HELLEN KELLY:
Yeah, I'm very lucky in the sense that I, you know, I work with a lot of schools in Europe now, but also I was a principal in Germany for three years, and they're often ahead of the game on many of these wellbeing practices. I don't include the UK in that, you know, I'm talking about continental Europe and they actually have laws in place now across the EU that prevent your employer from contacting you out of working hours. (CROSSTALK) and I think that's a great thing. (CROSSTALK) also we need to take responsibility ourselves together with our colleagues for making sure that we're not being drawn into these teens chats or WhatsApp groups or whatever this is outside of school. That it's more kind of cross, you know, crosses the line between blurs the line (CROSSTALK) social (CROSSTALK) professional because it's unhelpful to spend all evening online going on about when do you know what she said then? And then she said this and then she said that very, very unhelpful.

KENDRA PARKER:
Yeah. But even getting it from parents is even worse. And I think, you know, really (CROSSTALK).

DR. HELLEN KELLY:
Just a complete and (CROSSTALK) as far as (CROSSTALK) concerned. And again that goes back to educating stakeholders. If you're going to cut that off with parents, you need to educate them as to why that's, (CROSSTALK) know, why that's unhealthy (CROSSTALK) teachers and ultimately how that's going to impact on the outcome of their (CROSSTALK).

KENDRA PARKER:
And I think really important, we ended up putting a communication policy in place where, you know, we only accepted emails between 8:30 and 4:30 and (CROSSTALK) three business days until a teacher may reply to you and it may be a phone call rather than an email. So, we made it quite really (CROSSTALK), what we could accept. And then you have to of course, as a school leader, be really careful that everyone's implementing that consistently because you get one teacher who doesn't mind the emails, ruins it for the rest of them. So, yeah, lots of (CROSSTALK) there to support people.

DR. HELLEN KELLY:
That can be part of the cultural norms that we talked about. Kendra, where you're developing cultural norms collaboratively with the staff and how we communicate with each other outside of school can be part of that.

KENDRA PARKER:
Yeah.

DR. HELLEN KELLY:
Yeah.

KENDRA PARKER:
Georgia, Georgia, do you have any advice? Not you, Georgia, but from Georgia. Do you have any advice for overcoming scrutiny of staff wellbeing ideas and plans from upper leadership and more skeptical staff? I've read that as it says, (CROSSTALK) got that? Yeah.

DR. HELLEN KELLY:
I think that this is never going to be really very successful if you don't have leadership on board. So, (CROSSTALK) about educating leadership. And again, there's a section in my book, but it's really just drawing in more detail than I was able to in this forum today on the ideas that I introduced in the first section. So, helping the leadership team to understand why this is important and the impact that this can have on student outcomes, if it's not coming from the top, it's always going to be limited in its effectiveness. I'm sorry (CROSSTALK) say.

KENDRA PARKER:
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. It's got to be have your leadership team endorse it all the way through and support it. And I really love that framework that you had where the first part is a wellbeing group, because we're very focused on wellbeing of students at the moment. But what are we doing for staff? I'm just noting there's only three minutes to go and I know you've got some wrap up slides. Helen. (CROSSTALK) think we've sort of covered most of the questions or comments.

DR. HELLEN KELLY:
OK. The wrap up slides will only take a minute. So, there might be two more minutes then. OK. So, let's have a look at the main takeaways then. The first one is that healthy educators are more effective educators. Can't impress upon you how important it is for everyone to understand that burnout is primarily a condition of the workplace, not of the individual. And it's caused when there's a mismatch between what an individual needs and what the workplace provides. Number three. The goal of any principal should be to keep themselves first and foremost and all of their educators at the engagement end of the burnout continuum as much as possible. Next, to achieve this, principals need to take a strategic approach to find out what the main issues are in their school and then take steps to address them. Number five. Key signs and symptoms of burnout can also help principals identify when an individual is moving along the continuum towards burnout. Principals need to ensure they have systems in place for monitoring individual wellbeing and providing opportunities to discuss an individual's needs.

So, that's something that we haven't touched on much, but that has to be, you know, during whether they be formal or informal opportunities to check in with staff. Number seven, effective work recovery can help an individual to avoid burnout on its own. It's not going to have as much of an impact as if we deal with the things within the work environment, but it can do enough to just keep us more towards the middle and not towards that burnout end. The four work recovery experiences need to be practiced regularly and frequently. Principles can support their educators work recovery by providing opportunities for breaks during the workday, reducing the need for out of hours work, and avoiding out of hours communication, as we just discussed. And then there's just. Yeah, I think a minute maybe to (CROSSTALK), final burning questions.

KENDRA PARKER:
Someone's just asked Helen, if you have any model schools in UK or Australia that you know of that are doing positive work to address teacher burnout.

DR. HELLEN KELLY:
I do have a couple of model schools that I'm working with in the UK at the moment. And to be honest with you, this work is hard. It's not something where you can necessarily just look at what another school is doing. There's no one size fits all approach. But I do have some schools that are three years into this now and are really starting to make an impact. (CROSSTALK) what it's also important to understand is that the context has changed so much over the (CROSSTALK) few years, and where we were making an impact, the context has become more demanding. As I said at the beginning, we've experienced the pandemic and all the kind of fallout from the pandemic. (CROSSTALK) know that the youth mental health crisis has worsened. We know that there are more students with special educational needs coming into schools now, and that's made the context more challenging. (CROSSTALK) whilst there are schools that are having a lot of success in implementing my ideas, what we're finding is that we're kind of running uphill in the sense, you know, that we're trying to outrun a context that is worsening.

(CROSSTALK), and that is not helpful. Nevertheless, we are making an impact. And certainly with the workplace culture, I see huge impacts in the schools where I'm working, by focusing upon improving the workplace culture even within the first year.

KENDRA PARKER:
That's great. And, Helen, I'm gonna wrap us up and there was a couple of questions that we didn't get to or a couple of comments as well. But I think we've covered so much tonight, which is fantastic. And I just wanted to acknowledge something. What you just said there, you're working with schools on this stuff in Europe and in the UK. And I (CROSSTALK).

DR. HELLEN KELLY:
China. Singapore. (CROSSTALK).

KENDRA PARKER:
This is what we're experiencing here at the Victoria at the moment is worldwide.

DR. HELLEN KELLY:
Yeah. (UNKNOWN).

KENDRA PARKER:
With burnout, with workload, with teacher shortages, with increased student dysregulated behaviour, etc., etc., etc.. So, across the globe, we're all trying to work on this problem together. So, (CROSSTALK).

DR. HELLEN KELLY:
Yeah. And I think it's important to say Kendra as well, this is not just in the state sector. This is happening in the private sector too. This is happening in some wealthier schools in the world that I work with. It isn't just, you know, obviously, government resources are a factor, but even in schools where resources are (CROSSTALK), very healthy, this is happening.

KENDRA PARKER:
Yeah. Melanie did ask a question earlier. We might not, if Melanie wants to stay on to hear the answer. But she wondered how you transitioned out of education into research and how you gathered the energy to do it. So, (CROSSTALK)

DR. HELLEN KELLY:
Stay on for five (CROSSTALK) to talk to (UNKNOWN).

KENDRA PARKER:
Yeah, I think one more slide on Helen is just for people that are still with us. There's two of this thought leadership series left this year coming up later in July, we've got Ron Beghetto talking about the future of education that's really focused on AI and technology. So, if it's an area that you're interested in and its impact, that'll be a really terrific webinar. And then in August, we have Bruce Armstrong, who many of you will know was our, deputy secretary for education many years ago. And he actually started the, he was the inaugural director of the Bastow Institute of which is where I'm working now. So, he's gonna be talking about leading schools during times of disruption. And that is not just disruption thinking about Covid, but thinking about all these other factors that we just talked about that are impacting schools. So, please go on to our website and sign up for those if you're interested in joining those. But otherwise, thank you. I think once again, as I said, for me, I'm a lifelong learner.

And this fills my cup and this brings me joy. So, even though this is work, I actually find this really invigorating and great for my wellbeing to be able to think about these things and spend time for myself. So, I hope that you've all felt that as well, and filled your cups a little bit tonight, and you'll go home and have a shower and next time somebody, what did I write down? Next time somebody contacts you out of hours, you say to them, I'm sorry, but that is not supportive of my psychological detachment. I'm going to practice that statement. I really love it. So, thank you very much, Helen. Thank you everybody. And for anybody who does wanna stay and has a burning question, I think Helen has a couple more minutes she can spare for us, but.

DR. HELLEN KELLY:
Yeah.

KENDRA PARKER:
Otherwise go home and switch off. 
Find your third space.

DR. HELLEN KELLY:
I'm gonna stop sharing that.