Teachers’ Health: How General, Mental and Functional Health Indicators Compare to Other Employees? A Large French Population-Based Study

Abstract

Teachers’ health is a key factor of any successful education system, but available data are conflicting. To evaluate to what extent teachers’ health could be at risk, we used pre-pandemic data from the CONSTANCES population-based French cohort (inclusion phase: 2012–2019) and compared teachers (n = 12,839) included in the cohort with a random subsample selected among all other employees (n = 32,837) on four self-reported health indicators: perceived general health, depressive symptoms (CES-D scale), functional limitations in the last six months, and persistent neck/back troubles (Nordic questionnaire). We further restricted our comparison group to the State employees (n = 3583), who share more occupational similarities with teachers. Lastly, we focused on teachers and evaluated how their health status might differ across teaching levels (primary, secondary, and higher education). As compared to non-teacher employees, and even after adjusting for important demographic, socioeconomic, lifestyle, and occupational confounders, teachers were less likely to report bad perceived health and depressive symptoms but were more likely to present functional limitations. Trends were similar in the analyses restricted to State employees. Within the teaching population, secondary school teachers were more likely to report depressive symptoms but less frequently declared persistent neck/back troubles than primary school teachers. Our descriptive cross-sectional study based on a probability sampling procedure (secondary use of CONSTANCES inclusion data) did not support the idea that teachers’ health in France was particularly at risk in the pre-pandemic period. Both cross-cultural and longitudinal studies are needed to further gain information on the topic of teachers’ health around the world and to monitor its evolution over time, particularly during crises impacting the education system such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

The well-being and work-related stress of senior school leaders in Wales and Northern Ireland during COVID-19 “educational leadership crisis”: A cross-sectional descriptive study

“…Furthermore, although senior leaders in this study report lower well-being than the general population, perceived general health status is comparable to Census data collected in England and Wales in 2021 [ 85 ]. This is in line with research from France demonstrating comparable general health status between educational practitioners and other professions [ 86 ]. Senior leadership is considered a high occupational grade, this may offer protection for physical health as evidenced by findings in the Whitehall and Whitehall II cohort studies regarding occupation rank and psychosocial work environment [ 87 , 88 ].…”

Programas de intervención para el desarrollo de competencias socioemocionales en docentes de educación escolar: Una revisión narrativa.

“…La labor docente es considerada como una de las profesiones con mayor desgaste emocional a nivel mundial (Saïd et al, 2022). La función que desempeña el docente de educación básica y sus implicancias le demanda la movilización de recursos socioemocionales; en ese sentido, un manejo inadecuado de dichos recursos puede afectar considerablemente su bienestar y salud mental (Capone & Petrillo, 2020;Oliveira et al, 2021a).…”