Tuesday, December 11, 2007

In England, Inspection pressure 'drives teachers to suicide'

Graeme Paton, telegraph.co.uk
April 11, 2007

Teachers are being driven to suicide because of pressure from school inspectors, it was claimed yesterday.

Others are becoming hooked on drink and drugs or developing eating disorders after being swamped by work, according to the National Union of Teachers.

At the union's annual conference in Harrogate, teachers told how they had been reduced to tears in the classroom and warned that colleagues had taken their lives after working up to 90 hours a week.

One head teacher committed suicide just two months after quitting because of a critical inspection by Ofsted, the education watchdog.

Another teacher disappeared on the morning she was due to face Government inspectors and was found dead more than 10 months later in parkland.

A snapshot survey of primary and secondary school teachers in Nottingham, which was presented to the conference, revealed that a third resort to drugs, drink, smoking or binge eating to help them cope. One in 15 takes prescribed medication to get through the day, said the survey of 140 teachers

John Illingworth, former president of the NUT and a Nottingham headteacher, took early retirement after suffering a nervous breakdown in 2005.

He told the conference: "Teachers driven to the point of exhaustion and breakdown cannot be good for the children we teach.

"It is hard to imagine the emotional turmoil that drives a teacher to take their own life rather than face an Ofsted inspection. We are living in an education reign of terror and we must put a stop to it now."

Ian Murch, the NUT treasurer, said: "It is a scandal of huge proportions the way teachers are chewed up and spat out by our education system."

Magenta Stonestreet, a psychology teacher from North Tyneside, told the conference how she struggled with depression and was forced to take four months off work through illness.

"One of the things which I think was good is that I managed to get the kids out of the classroom the other day before I cried," she said.

Mr Illingworth told the conference that he had received letters from teachers who had suffered similar problems. One was from the wife of a head teacher who revealed that her husband became depressed after a critical school inspection.

Reading from the letter, Mr Illingworth said the head teacher did not want to give up the job because he wanted to prove himself again. "He never believed he was any good any more," said the letter.

"Eventually after many bad nights of screaming and shaking, he gave up and could not get out of bed to go to work. He retired six months later."

It added: "He was a complete mental mess. The day his job was filled I now see he had given up on life altogether. Two months later he ended it."

For many years, teachers have complained that the stress of Ofsted has been too much to bear.

In 2000, an inquest into the drowning of Pamela Relf, who taught at Middlefield Primary School, Cambridgeshire, heard that she had been depressed for some time, but broke down in tears after criticism from inspectors.

She left a handwritten note which said: "I am now finding the stress of my job too much. The pace of work and the long days are more than I can do."

The NUT said it had written to Beverley Hughes, the children's minister, requesting a meeting to discuss the problem of stress, but had been refused.