Teachers have been forced to pop pills to cope with increasing workload, a teachers’ union has been told on Saturday. Member Owain Morgan-Lee told the Nasuwt teaching union’s annual conference in Birmingham that many colleagues had been signed off as “long-term sick, because they’re popping pills to try to cheer themselves up because the job is dragging them down to a point where their health is in a serious, serious, condition”.
“It’s grinding down our morale, grinding down the good teachers of the UK,” he said. Mr Morgan-Lee said that at a recent wellbeing session at his school he had considered whether he could “do some finger-painting up in the art department for a few hours” or “I might decide to knit and natter in the textiles department.
“I decided to do a mindfulness session. Lying on the sweaty, cold, hall floor, thinking about what noise my knees were making, how my toes felt, and what that grape tasted like and how it felt in my mouth,” he said.
