“I couldn’t understand why I was being treated like I was somehow milking the system for having time off for a medical condition.”

I am a teacher and I have depression and anxiety.

Sadly these days, this is a sentence that is true not only of me but also of the majority of my colleagues.

I was diagnosed back in 2019 and to be honest I was quite fortunate, because all it took was a trip to my doctor and a referral to talking therapy; a self-referral, done online, so it was really simple for me to access support. I know that’s not true for a lot of people and I’m very grateful that I was able to get the help I needed quite quickly. I was also given antidepressants and even though at first I was reluctant to take them, I have found that medication does help me cope better day to day. Having said that, I still battle daily with my illness especially as a teacher.

It’s always been tough to manage my workload. As soon as my NQT year was out of the way the responsibilities began to pile up. Unpaid, obviously. It was very much the culture that you were expected to be in at 7am and out after 6pm to ‘prove’ how dedicated you were to your job. I changed career and have children so this created all kinds of problems with childcare and snarky comments if I ever had to leave before anyone else.

Turning down extra responsibilities would mean you were deemed to not be invested in your career, so you could forget applying for a paid TLR when one came up. This created a really toxic culture where everyone was obsessed with getting promoted and leadership would exploit that, constantly dangling carrots to staff in order to push them to do more. Everyone was burned out but we dare not complain.

After my diagnosis I told my line manager.  I mulled it over for weeks as half of me was convinced they would use it against me as an excuse not to promote me or criticise my teaching. I had some really challenging classes and was worried that they might think having depression and anxiety was an excuse for not being able to control behaviour. My manager just rolled their eyes and said “Who isn’t depressed and anxious in teaching?” I laughed it off but felt a little bit hurt they weren’t taking me seriously. They just told me to tell them if things got worse or if I needed anything, but other than that they didn’t seem concerned.

Shortly after this, coronavirus hit and the country went into lockdown. My depression and anxiety became much worse due to the uncertainty of the situation, being isolated from friends and family and the stress of trying to teach from home with all three of my children in the house. It has always been my school’s way that emails and messages are sent outside of working hours, including late into the night. Text messages about work are quite often sent at 11pm requiring action by the next morning. If I didn’t reply to a text straight away, it would be followed up with a phone call, even in the evenings and at weekends.

I was constantly ‘on call’ during the pandemic. The assumption was if you weren’t teaching a class online, you were available. I would be trying to juggle lesson planning, marking, managing data, calling home for my form group, responding to parent and student emails, attending online work meetings and home schooling children who were too young to be left to their own devices, whilst the phone rang nonstop checking up on what I was doing. I felt constantly on edge and stressed. By the time I returned to work that September, my nerves were shredded and I was exhausted.

I visited my doctor and he signed me off work. I could tell that my line manager was not happy, and they informed me that even though I was off work I would still need to plan cover lessons and be available to speak to.

Three days into a fortnight’s leave, I got a message saying I was generating too much cover and to take the pressure off other staff members I needed to teach from home to the classes in school. I was already spending all my days re-planning lessons as the teachers covering my lessons didn’t know anything about my subject.

I was soon back up to my usual timetable even though I was meant to be off sick. As I was at home, my colleagues assumed I was sitting around doing nothing and would ask me to look at extra tasks too. By the time I returned when my sick note ran out, I felt more stressed than ever.

I was struggling to cope with how depressed and anxious I felt about work and would often cry after the students had left. I overheard some colleagues moaning about me to my line manager over the fact they had to cover my lessons and that I was so ‘miserable.’ I felt really guilty that I had become such a burden to my team. They couldn’t understand why I wasn’t suddenly ‘better’ after two weeks of being signed off. I was expected to be magically be fixed and continue on as if nothing had happened.

One afternoon I overheard some of my department gossiping in the staffroom. “Everyone is depressed and anxious, why does she expect special treatment?”, “It’s just an excuse for time off,” and, “She’s made life difficult for everyone else expecting us to cover all the time, we have lives too,” were some of the comments. I was mortified when I realised they were talking about me. I thought my diagnosis was confidential but somehow they knew about my condition and the only way that could have happened is if my line manager had told them.

After Covid, out school began a big push on student mental health. We were bending over backwards to accommodate the needs of anxious, depressed students and prioritise student wellbeing. Seeing the difference between how mentally ill students were treated compared to how I was treated as a staff member was jarring.  I started to realise that it’s okay not to be okay- but only if it doesn’t inconvenience anyone else.

Not long after this the scrutiny started. My line manager and leadership would keep ‘popping in’ to lessons. Book trawls began to take place much more regularly. My colleagues would criticise my work. Responsibilities were delegated to others. Requests for time off and CPD were turned down. Everything I did was checked and needed to be justified and I began to feel micromanaged.  I felt guilty any time I wasn’t working and paranoia set in that I was going to be managed out.

A few weeks later I was signed off again due to the stress I was under. I worked into the early hours of the morning and all through the weekends redoing work that had been criticised. I had no time for my family and no life outside work. Of course I had to continue working whilst signed off, as I had before.

On my first day back I had a return to work meeting. I was setting up in my classroom when the HR representative burst in and told me my lesson was being covered and I had to go for a meeting with her straight away. I was told this was because they wanted to be certain I was mentally stable enough to be left alone with children. I found that very hurtful.

The questioning was intense from both HR and my line manager. One of the first things I was asked was if I was aware of the consequences of my absence and the problems it caused for other people. Of course I was. I was reminded of it nonstop.

They asked what I was doing to address the issue of my absenteeism and prevent future absences. I was told they were going to refer me to Occupational Health when I couldn’t answer their questions about how long my condition would last for.  When I asked if I could have a staged return to work I was told absolutely not, as I teach a core subject and my students were already behind thanks to my absence.

They then went on to say that my time off work was excessive and they were now going to put me on an attendance review. If I had more time off, this would likely lead to disciplinary proceedings. I was horrified. I had an excellent attendance (and performance) record up until then. They also told me that my levels of absence meant I’d lost my bonus entitlement. I couldn’t understand why I was being treated like I was somehow milking the system for having time off for a medical condition. When I looked at my referral form for Occupational Health I saw that they wanted to know whether I was suitable to continue teaching. I was really shocked. My capability had never been in doubt before and this hadn’t come up as a topic of conversation in any meetings at work. Did they want me out?

After that, I found myself being put on cover during almost all of my free periods. When I mentioned to a colleague that I was struggling to plan and mark because of all the cover I was doing, they snapped, “Well, now you know how we felt.” So I kept quiet and avoided colleagues, eating my lunch in my car away from the staff room.

I began to miss counselling appointments as I was too afraid of asking for any more time off to go to them. If I did ask, I would be quizzed suspiciously about why I couldn’t go after work instead. They didn’t understand that I didn’t have the luxury of choice on the NHS.

Not long after this, Ofsted visited. This is an extremely stressful time for anyone who works in a school, but for me the pressure became unbearable. I was getting constant emails, texts and calls demanding information and data immediately, even very late into the night. When an inspector visited one of my worst behaved classes, my line manager went crazy and accused me of being too weak to be a teacher as I couldn’t control the class. Our Ofsted rating was downgraded from Good to Requires Improvement and I was left under no illusions that they thought it was in part down to me.

I was now a pariah in my department. If I walked into the staff room, it fell silent. The scrutiny continued and there was also pressure for me to provide catch up sessions to all my groups after school because of my time off sick (only three weeks, but my line manager was convinced this had damaged my students’ learning irreversibly). I was also still being subjected to intense monitoring and ‘constructive’ criticism on a daily basis. I’d never been so unhappy in my working life. I knew what I needed to do.

I handed my notice in and kept my head down for the remaining three months I was at the school, secretly worried they might give me a poor reference if I drew attention to myself. Those twelve weeks, I was treated as if I no longer existed. I was frozen out of departmental discussions and if I chipped in with ideas in meetings, I was told “Well, you’re leaving anyway .” Despite everything I still loved my job and being ignored hurt. When my job was advertised and I made a flippant comment about how strange it felt to think I was being replaced and how much I would miss my students, another teacher in my department laughed and said, “Teachers of (my subject) are ten a penny, you’ll be forgotten about by half term.”

On my final day I didn’t even get a card. Walking out of the school gates a final time and seeing other teachers also leaving for new jobs, piled high with gifts from their colleagues, made me upset but I also realised just how badly I’d been treated. Looking back I wish I’d spoken to my union. I do feel discriminated against, I just didn’t realise it at the time. Teaching is a profession where everyone knows everyone else, and a teacher friend of mine who knows my replacement at my old school has told me that things are even worse there now, and my ex colleagues still speak about me negatively. It’s so disappointing.

I know of many schools with a similar culture of intolerance for mental health problems. There is an impression that mental health is an excuse to not work, but really schools need to start looking at the reasons why so many staff have mental health problems in the first place rather than punishing their employees.

I now work on supply and am much happier. If I’m struggling I don’t have to force myself into work. Supply teaching has its challenges but I would never go back to my old school. In this day and age no school should be forcing staff out because of their mental health.