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Decentring the ‘resilient teacher’: exploring interactions between individuals and their social ecologies
Project description
Project Lead:
Dr Steph Ainsworth
Duration:
1/12/2022 – 30/11/2025 (36 months)
Organisation:
Manchester Metropolitan University
Research theme:
- teaching and learning, with a focus on teachers and their recruitment, retention and professional development
The four nation focus:
- England
Project overview
- Aims
The project aims to develop a more nuanced critical engagement with the concept of teacher resilience and to create more resilient environments for teachers at local, regional and national levels.
- Description
This project will promote teacher resilience in schools by exploring the factors which affect teachers at the individual and school level. It will involve multi-level modelling of large-scale survey data, place-based case studies and the development of ‘ecological interventions’ within schools. The findings will be used to empower educators across the UK via creation and dissemination of an online package of resources which will be shared with schools and policy audiences and used to promote teacher resilience both locally and nationally.
- Project partners
National Education Union (NEU), Education Support.
- Partnership plans
The project will be underpinned by termly Education Innovation Labs, where school leaders, researchers, and other stakeholders will share inter-disciplinary and intra-professional understandings to inform the methods and interventions used to promote teacher resilience.
- Researchers
- Dr Steph Ainsworth (PI)
- Dr Jeremy Oldfield
- Dr Carrie Adamson
- Research findings and policy recommendations
- Teacher Resilience Policy briefing 1 (PDF, 0.29MB, 2025)
Exploring key predictors of teacher wellbeing, job satisfaction and burnout: Building a broader conceptualisation of teacher resilience
This briefing note addresses the urgent teacher retention and mental health crisis. It explores the key predictors of teacher resilience, presenting key findings from the survey phase of the project. The note presents the top six predictors of wellbeing, job satisfaction and burnout, demonstrating that the question of 'What is most important for teacher resilience?' depends on which outcome you are focusing on. It discusses the related implications for policy, arguing for the need to move beyond the dominant teacher wellbeing discourse towards a broader conceptualisation of what it means for teachers to thrive.
