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Research evidence, and the direct experience of many practitioners, suggest that teaching is a stressful profession. However, a number of factors, including, for example, the age group taught, the number of pupils in the class, the hours worked and the type of school, may mediate the types and degree of stress experienced. In this article, Michelle Williams, who carried out this study as part of her degree in psychology at the University of East London and who is not a teacher, and Professor Irvine Gersch, course director of the MSc course in educational psychology at the University of East London, describe work undertaken to compare whether teaching in a mainstream or special school is perceived as more stressful and whether there are different stresses in both types of school. The authors designed a questionnaire to measure teacher stress and collected data from 41 teachers in three mainstream and two special schools. Their results reveal no significant difference in the overall level of stress experienced between mainstream and special school teachers, but five factors do emerge indicating that different types of stress are experienced in the different school settings studied.

In this article, Tina Axup, an educational psychologist working in Southend-on-Sea, and Irvine Gersch, director of educational and child psychology programmes at the University of East London, describe a small-scale study of teachers' attitudes regarding the impact of student behaviour on their professional lives. Anecdotal evidence within a local authority educational psychology service suggested that increasing teacher concern about student disruptive behaviour was causing significant professional anxiety. Tina Axup formulated a brief questionnaire to explore teacher perceptions of the student responses that appeared to cause them stress. Although it is difficult to generalise from the results because of the small sample size and low return, the most frequently selected behaviours seen as challenging were found to be 'low level', 'verbal', 'work avoidance' and 'out of seat behaviour'. The most frequent teacher reactions were said to be 'frustration', 'bewilderment', 'shock' and concern about the impact on other students in the class. The key favoured coping strategies reported included behaviour management techniques, praise and trying to understand the difficult behaviour, while personally talking to peers, switching off after the lesson, taking exercise and talking to family and friends. For future help, the preferred teacher options included the employment of more specialist behaviour support staff. Tina Axup and Irvine Gersch discuss the implications of these findings and identify further areas for research.

a autism services (south lee), Brothers of charity southern services, cork, ireland; b school of Psychology, university of East london, london, uK

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