Exploring the well-being of early career teachers: staying afloat and fixing the boat during COVID-19?

The COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on schools, leading to far-reaching and rapid responses by those in the sector. This included the cohort of student-teachers who were training to teach during the 2019–2020 academic year. Due to a national UK lockdown in the spring and summer of 2020, this cohort of individuals were unable to undertake school placements where they would gain the majority of their classroom experience before starting as qualified teachers. This paper reports on data we collected in a British Academy funded study from members of the cohort as they started their first year of teaching, to try to understand the impact of the loss of practical classroom teaching whilst training and to understand the extent of the impact this had on their well-being as they entered an unfamiliar and stressed sector. The results from the analysis suggest that this cohort of newly qualified teachers were meeting multiple challenges, which in some cases had a reported impact on their well-being. However, where they were well supported, and where strong professional relationships were developed, and performative measures were reconsidered, these challenges were more than compensated for by the resources individuals could draw on to ensure their continued development and positive well-being. However, there are still questions to answer as to how this cohort will react as schools return to performative, accountability-driven contexts, approaches to education that this cohort have had little experience of.