Reclaiming teacher wellbeing through reflective diary-writing

Teacher wellbeing – particularly negative teacher wellbeing – is a topic regularly hitting newspaper headlines. The sense of crisis in headlines such as ‘I am getting out before it kills me’ (Busby, 2019a) and ‘Huge rise in teachers welling up at work’ (Speck, 2019), is evidenced in the recent ‘Teacher Wellbeing Index’ (TWI) (Education Support, 2019) report, which found that ‘work-related stress’ (p. 30) levels have seriously risen during the last year, with workload cited by 74 per cent of teachers ‘as the main reason for considering leaving’ the profession (p. 7). This was followed by 65 per cent of teachers choosing the option ‘not feeling valued’ – ‘a new category for 2019’ (p. 47). Additionally, 74 per cent of education practitioners found it difficult to ‘switch off and relax’ – ‘a major contributing factor to a negative/worklife balance’ (p. 6). Yet, ‘more than a quarter (27%) of respondents would not speak to anybody’ about ‘men