Staff mental health and wellbeing plan for schools

Why do I need a Staff Mental Health and Wellbeing Plan for my school?

Developing a staff mental health and wellbeing plan for your school or education setting is a great place to start when outlining your commitment to prioritising the wellbeing of teachers and education staff.

It’s a place where school and education leaders can set out clear areas of focus, agreed actions and measures of success while being clear about who is responsible for delivering on the actions included in the plan.

A good plan isn’t something that is developed and then sits on a shelf. It should be regularly reviewed, measured against, updated and communicated to staff.

When it comes to staff mental health and wellbeing this is vital, because the needs of school staff will consistently change. Your plan may form part of a wider mental health and wellbeing strategy, which sets out your schools overall vision and aims when it comes to prioritising staff mental health and wellbeing.

What should I consider when creating a Staff Mental Health and Wellbeing Plan for my school?

• An audit to better understand where your school currently is in terms of delivering staff mental health and wellbeing activity. You can use our simple Wellbeing Audit Tool here as a starting point.

• A staff survey to understand staff needs, current levels of wellbeing and to gain an understanding of the types of support staff want. We have suggested some wellbeing measures here that you may want to include.

• Conversations with staff across different groups to understand any additional barriers to accessing support - don’t assume that everybody has the same needs or the same barriers to accessing support. To ensure equality of access, talking to staff directly is important before developing your plan.

• Your plan doesn’t need to be complicated. It needs to be clear and it needs to be understood by all staff if you want them to engage with it. It should also be realistic and acknowledge that supporting staff mental health and wellbeing isn’t always easy.

• Some things will take a lot longer to embed, while something like rolling out line manager mental health training, may be much simpler to do.

• Trying not to over promise, and under deliver, will help in engaging staff in the plan and providing the confidence that the commitment is there to deliver on it.

Tips for developing a Mental Health and Wellbeing Plan for teachers and education staff

You should be driven by the outcomes of these inputs when deciding on what themes and actions to include in your plan. To help guide you, you may want to think about the themes that are set out in our free downloadable Wellbeing Audit Tool for schools.

Our audit tool provides you with an overview of themes and the type of actions you need to consider within each theme, including:

1. How you’ll create a structured approach to prioritising staff mental health and wellbeing.

2. What you’ll do to create conditions and culture to drive positive mental health outcomes for all staff.

3. How you’ll promote an open culture around mental health.

4. How you’ll build confidence and capability, with particular focus on line managers and wellbeing leads.

5. What tools and support you will provide to all staff, including those living with a mental health problem.

6. How you’ll create a transparent approach to measuring staff mental health and wellbeing.

Free Staff Mental Health and Wellbeing Action Plan template for schools

Download our simple action plan template for schools below. This is the minimum information we would encourage capturing when developing your action plan, but you may wish to add further columns to capture additional information.

The important thing to highlight is that every school is different, so no one size fits all, but as a minimum a plan should have clear themes, actions, measure of success and accountability in the way of who is responsible for the actions.