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

Wood, P ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9707-0501, Quickfall, A and Clarke, E, 2025. Exploring the well-being of early career teachers: staying afloat whilst fixing the boat during COVID-19. Practice. ISSN 0950-3153

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Practice
Creators:	Wood, P., Quickfall, A. and Clarke, E.
Publisher:	Routledge
Date:	19 March 2025
ISSN:	0950-3153
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1080/25783858.2025.2473323 DOI 2426742 Other
Rights:	This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham Institute of Education
Record created by:	Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added:	16 Apr 2025 08:46
Last Modified:	16 Apr 2025 08:46
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/53415

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