Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment he has made of trends in the level of teacher morale.

The Stevenson/Farmer Review states that public sector employers should support employee wellbeing. The Department is currently considering the evidence about teachers’ wellbeing and will consider how the Department can further support the sector. The Department is taking action in a number of areas that teachers tell us are key to reducing workplace stress, including eliminating unnecessary workload. The Department is working extensively with unions, teachers and Ofsted to challenge practices that create unnecessary workload.

The Department is monitoring the impact of our actions to date, for example, by using snapshot surveys to establish whether schools are using the recommendations from the three independent review groups, to tackle workload issues. The Department has committed to running a large-scale survey on workload every two years to inform our policies. The first wave of the Teacher Workload Survey 2016 was published in February 2017.