Compassion, Wellbeing, and Burnout in Teachers: Examining the Relationships Between Individual-Level Factors and Exploring the Impact of Systemic School Climate

Supervisors: Colin Woodcock, Robin Banerjee, Clara Strauss, Kate Cavanagh 

There has been increasing emphasis on the importance of promoting positive mental health and wellbeing in teachers. Separate strands of research indicate that developing teachers' social and emotional competencies (SECs; e.g., compassion) and improving school climate are associated with better teacher wellbeing outcomes.

However, there is a lack of research exploring the interaction between teachers' individual levels of compassion and the systemic school climate on teacher wellbeing; the extent to which individual capacity for compassion and systemic school climate matters.

The current thesis aims to address this gap.

This thesis comprises two papers.

Following an introductory chapter, the first paper (Chapter 2) presents a systematic review and meta-analysis of empirical studies which examined the relationships between self-compassion/other-compassion and mental health and wellbeing constructs in teachers. Where data on school climate were available, this review also aimed to explore the impact that systemic school climate factors have on these relationships.

The second paper (Chapter 3) presents an empirical study which recruited a large sample of UK teachers (N = 244) and examined the relationships between their self-reported levels of other-compassion, self-compassion, perceptions of school climate, burnout, and wellbeing.

The extent to which teachers' perceptions of their school climate impacted the relationships between their compassionate capacities and their wellbeing and burnout was also examined.

Together, findings from these two papers will likely further our understanding of how teacher mental health and wellbeing can be improved and the extent to which individual-level and systemic factors matter.

It is anticipated that these findings will also guide future research in this field and have implications for practice, contributing towards building teacher and whole school approaches to wellbeing.