Burnout

You’ve been back a week since half term! A whole week at work after a whole week off – you must be flying high, right? Energy levels at the highest they’ve been since September, lessons going brilliantly, students finally accepting you and their behaviour is impeccable, right?

Wrong. So, so wrong.

Why the hell do we all feel so knackered? Why is the kids behaviour the worst its been all year?

I think this term feels hard for many reasons, but one of the main ones is the weather and the lack of daylight. In the U.K. at the moment, we are being subject to the kind of rain¹ that would make Noah decide to build a boat. I’m pretty sure it has rained where I live every day since Christmas, and it’s exhausting. Give me some sun! At least let me walk my dog without getting soaked and then spending half an hour cleaning him.

Things are getting better slowly. It’s no longer dark on the drive to work, and some days it’s even light on the way home. Clocks will go forwards soon and then Spring hits and things will improve dramatically. Give me some of that vitamin D! Half term was a washout, but becuase you were home, you saw all the things that needed doing. If you have a garden, you’ve seen just how much you need to do to get it looking nice – coming home in the dark has saved you from that for a few months.

Possibly in half term, you did the things that you were too tired to do during the term time: see friends, visit family, drink too much alcohol, stay up too late because you could. The week flew by quicker than the Millenium Falcon can do the Kessel Run².

And now, you’re back in work. Time has shrunk back to it’s usual crawl, and yet there is still too much to do and not enough time to do it in.

I think this is a large reason for the burnout we feel in this term: exams are coming up fast, and somehow your year 11s seems to have gone backwards since their previous round of mocks. SLT and your line manager are on your back about what you are going to do to improve results³, and its overwhelming. The GCSE exams finish on 27th June this year, exactly four months from today. How the hell are you going to make these significant changes to results in such a short space of time, when the students haven’t learned it in the previous 13 years?

Yet, we have to try. We owe it to the students to give our best over the next few months. For you, it’s one more day. For them, it’s the rest of their lives. It matters, and that is both stressful and exhausting. Stress is a secret killer and a staggering 74% of people have reported feeling stressed to the point of being overwhelmed in the last year⁴. Almost a third reported suicidal thoughts as a result of stress.

The short answer to all of this is we need to take better care of ourselves. We need to carve out time to do things we love and make sure it’s absolutely sacrosant in our day or week. If reading calms you, then read a book – turn the TV off, put your marking in another room, or better yet, leave it at work and go read. Similarly if you prefer to binge watch something⁵, do that. Go do some exercise. Get yourself outside. Fresh air (even in cities) really helps clear the mind. Go for a walk – it doesn’t have to be far.

I also write books (mostly horror), so my go to was always to write a story. Students got wind of this⁶ and so wanted to be in the stories. I started putting thier names in my books and would chuckle as I generally killed them in some horrific way. This isn’t meant to make me sound like some kind of psychopath, but it worked for me. One lad asked me in the middle of the lesson how he died, and I said his squad got irritated with him and killed him before the monsters could⁷. Everyone laughed. Well, apart from one kid…

My point is you need to do something that isn’t work related. Something that will help you switch off. You are no good to anyone if you are too exhausted to think clearly, so look after yourself. If you do that, you can then be all Michelle Pfieffer in Dangerous Minds and say ‘fuck it, I’m going to make them learn’.

Now look at your class list again. Who has improved? Celebrate that – have a celebratory cup of tea or something stronger. If no-one has⁸, look at smaller margins, like an improvement in attitude. Find something positive – anything! Build on that. Then look at the student who is trying, and look at their mock papers again. What do they need to work on⁹? Make sure it’s a topic area that has chunky marks with it. For example (maths sorry, but hopefully you get the gist), most students can’t do simultaneous equations, but they tend to only be worth four marks at most (out of 240, or 300), so is it really worth the effort to focus on that? Probably not, so look at other areas like percentages and ratios. Do that, rinse and repeat. Slowly but surely, the marks will improve, and so will grades.

There’s no getting away from the fact this takes time and is hard work, so look at what you can ditch. That massively important survey SLT need you to fill in NOW? The paperwork needed for no discernible reason at all¹⁰? Bin it off. Be strong – tell them you haven’t had time because you are focussing on improving the outcomes of the exam classes. That’s a hard sentence to argue with.

Until next time.

FOOTNOTES

1. Feb, 2026 in case you stumble on this at some point in the future. ↩︎
2. For the non-Star Wars fans reading this (Robbo), that’s fast. ↩︎
3. I’ve written about this before and my stance has not changed. Surely its what the students need to do and how we can help? ↩︎
4. Stress statistics and facts UK 2026 – Priory ↩︎
5. I highly recommend Shrinking on Apple TV. ↩︎
6. Yes, I told them. The life of an indie author… ↩︎
7. This is in my book The Exeter Incident. ↩︎
8. Oh shit… ↩︎
9. I guarantee that lots of the class also need help with that topic. ↩︎
10. Well, unless you count SLT justifying their existence as a reason… ↩︎