The Role of Human Values on Teachers’ Well-Being in the UK.

Abstract

Struggling with mental health is said to be most prevalent in teachers than any other occupation. The mental health and well-being of teachers can be affected by an array of issues. These include: changes in policy, budget cuts in total school spending, bigger staff to student ratio and higher burnout rates. As a consequence, this hinders the effectiveness of teaching and can negatively impact children and young people’s education. Rather than just stating the macro factors that affect teachers’ mental health, this study seeks to explore the relationship between human values and depressive symptoms in individuals, using data from the European Social Survey (ESS-7). Using a sample of 105 teaching professionals in the UK. The human values scale (Schwartz 2012) was used to measure individuals’ human values, and the depression scale - the shorter version of Centre for Epidemiologic StudiesDepression (CES-D) (Radloff 1977; ESS 2014) was used to measure individuals’ depressive symptoms in terms of happiness and depression. Findings from the study show that teachers with higher levels of selftranscendence values are more likely to report being happy. Although, there was a significant relationship between openness to change and happiness, the correlation was not in the direction hypothesised.