To highlight effective levers to promote teachers’ wellbeing worldwide, particularly during difficult times such as the COVID-19 pandemic, we investigated work-related factors associated with teacher wellbeing, across borders and cultures. In six countries/territories, we examined the factors that were most consistently and strongly associated with two indicators of wellbeing at work: (i) job satisfaction; and (ii) work/life balance, and three indicators of general wellbeing: (i) subjective health; (ii) mental health; and (iii) life satisfaction. Between May and July 2021, after 18 months of the pandemic, 8000 teachers answered the first edition of the International Barometer of Education Personnel’s Health and Wellbeing (I-BEST): 3646 teachers from France, 2349 from Québec, 1268 from Belgium, 302 from Morocco, 222 from The Gambia, and 215 from Mexico. For each country/territory and each wellbeing indicator, we used a forward stepwise regression procedure to identify important determinants among a carefully selected set of 31 sociodemographic, private, and professional life factors. Aside from healthcare access, the factors most consistently and strongly associated with teacher wellbeing in France, Québec and Belgium (samples whose size were ≥1000) were related to the psychosocial and the organizational dimensions of work, namely: feeling of safety at school, autonomy at work, and the quality of relationships with superiors and quality of relationships with students. In the smaller samples of teachers from the three remaining countries (Morocco, The Gambia and Mexico), exploratory analyses showed that the feeling of safety and autonomy at work were, there too, consistently associated with wellbeing indicators. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the factors most consistently associated with teachers’ wellbeing across countries were related to security and autonomy at work, supporting the importance to consider these aspects in a continuous, structural way at school. Factors associated with teachers’ wellbeing in very different contexts require further cross-cultural study.
Summary Education professionals play a critical role in health education, both as knowledge providers and as role-models. Drawing on the CONSTANCES French cohort (baseline 2012–19) and adjusting for important confounders, we compared education professionals (n = 14 730) with a random sample of non-education sector employees (n = 34 244) on three indicators of high-risk behaviour (at-risk drinking, current smoking, past-year cannabis use) and three indicators of unhealthy lifestyle (low physical activity, poor adherence to nutritional guidelines, overweight/obesity). Among education professionals, we distinguished between teachers (n = 12 820), school principals (n = 372), senior education advisers (n = 189), school health professionals (n = 128) and school service staff (n = 1221). Compared with non-education sector employees with similar demographic and socioeconomic profiles, teachers were less likely to be at-risk drinkers, to smoke, to have used cannabis in the past year and to be overweight/obese. Other non-teaching education professionals were also less involved in high-risk behaviours than non-education employees, but results were more mixed concerning some lifestyle indicators, with certain non-teaching education professional groups showing a higher likelihood of being physically inactive or overweight/obese. In this nationwide French study, our results suggest a window of opportunity to promote school staff health but also indirectly, that of the youth with whom they interact daily. We suggest that school staff should be supported in health matters not only through the provision of health information but also most importantly, through the development of a favourable and supportive environment enabling them to put health knowledge into practice.
Teachers’ health is a key factor of any successful education system, but available data are conflicting. To evaluate to what extent teachers’ health could be at risk, we used pre-pandemic data from the CONSTANCES population-based French cohort (inclusion phase: 2012–2019) and compared teachers (n = 12,839) included in the cohort with a random subsample selected among all other employees (n = 32,837) on four self-reported health indicators: perceived general health, depressive symptoms (CES-D scale), functional limitations in the last six months, and persistent neck/back troubles (Nordic questionnaire). We further restricted our comparison group to the State employees (n = 3583), who share more occupational similarities with teachers. Lastly, we focused on teachers and evaluated how their health status might differ across teaching levels (primary, secondary, and higher education). As compared to non-teacher employees, and even after adjusting for important demographic, socioeconomic, lifestyle, and occupational confounders, teachers were less likely to report bad perceived health and depressive symptoms but were more likely to present functional limitations. Trends were similar in the analyses restricted to State employees. Within the teaching population, secondary school teachers were more likely to report depressive symptoms but less frequently declared persistent neck/back troubles than primary school teachers. Our descriptive cross-sectional study based on a probability sampling procedure (secondary use of CONSTANCES inclusion data) did not support the idea that teachers’ health in France was particularly at risk in the pre-pandemic period. Both cross-cultural and longitudinal studies are needed to further gain information on the topic of teachers’ health around the world and to monitor its evolution over time, particularly during crises impacting the education system such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
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