Teachers point towards school accountability as main driver of stress

The close monitoring of schools and student achievement data in the English education system is unlikely to be a one-way street to "school improvement" due to the stress it causes teachers, finds a new study by UCL researchers. The paper, which is published today and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, suggests that although increasing accountability may bring about short-term improvements in student performance, this could be counterproductive if it reduces teacher supply in the long-term and leads to shortages of high-quality teachers. The researchers analysed data from the 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) of over 100,000 teachers from more than 40 countries. They found that England sits towards the top of the 'accountability' scale and that high levels of measurements of educational performance - such as school assessments being used to make judgements about the effectiveness of teachers, whether there are school league tables and whether there are inspections of schools -  could partly be driving higher stress levels among teachers in England. For example, 68% of teachers in England report feeling accountability-related stress, compared to a cross-country average of around 45%. Professor John Jerrim (UCL Institute of Education) said: "Accountability is becoming increasingly common within school-systems across the world yet many are concerned about the impact it is having upon teachers' workload and wellbeing and whether this is turning people away from the teaching profession.