Wellbeing at a Tipping Point in Education

Read time:  2 minutes 3 seconds

Picture this. The bell rings, but there’s no teacher in sight.

Kids are sitting in their seats but their classroom echoes with an unnerving silence as they wait. This is a reality we’re edging closer to everyday.

Our educators, the architects of our future, are vanishing.

Overworked, underappreciated and under immense strain, many are bidding farewell to their noble profession.

The result is a deepening educational crisis that threatens to leave our youth without the guidance they desperately need for their growth.

But wait, you ask, where are the fresh graduates from our universities to fill these gaps?

That’s the crux of the crisis.

Within the next 2 years it is estimated that there will be a shortfall of 4,100 teachers graduating compared to the positions they’re needed for, meaning we have dropped below the replacement rate.

This means not just more work for the remaining teachers, but a detrimental impact on the quality of education for our children.

It’s a domino effect that doesn’t stop at the classroom door but extends far into the future of the kids affected.

For this, we need a robust response, one that both values and supports our educators.

A response that goes beyond the mere numbers game, addressing the core issue of working conditions that has led us here.

There is no quick fix for this situation, but within any challenging environment there are two ways to address it.

We either reduce the requirements of the situation (workload, stressors, external pressure etc.);

Or we increase the resources we have to deal with those requirements (more staff, improved training, better support, greater resilience and physical and mental resources etc.).

For our part, this is what Kinex Health is dedicated to.

We can’t fix the crisis on our own, but we can take the same principles we use to improve the greatly wellbeing of organisations and apply them to schools, namely:

• Assess the specific challenges schools and staff are facing.
• Work with all stakeholders within schools to develop a plan that addresses specific pain points.
• Improve the health and wellbeing skill sets and outcomes of all school staff to help them to be healthy and well within the parameters of their working environments (increase resources).
• Work with school leaders to optimise the working environment to make it easier for staff to be healthy and well (decrease requirements).

A program that addresses these areas is what we’ve been working on these past months and it’s now ready to be deployed.

Rarely do we ask for anything in these newsletters but today we will.

If you’re in education or have kids in school, pass on our details to your school leaders and get them to contact us, or pass on their details to us and we’ll reach out to them for a chat.

This is a problem that affects us all and one that we can help solve together.

So let’s do it.

For more info on this check out pretty much any of our stuff on LinkedIn or send me an email at [email protected] and let’s have a chat.