The Weight We Carry: What Pressures Are Teachers Facing Today?

By Rebecca Underwood

Teaching was once a noble craft, anchored in autonomy, care and community. A profession where wisdom was passed from hand to hand, voice to voice and the classroom belonged to the teacher who stood at its helm. But now? Many teachers feel like passengers on someone else’s ship - pulled by tides they didn’t choose, steered by leaders they don’t trust, and drowning in initiatives that dilute their expertise.

So, what pressures do teachers face in today’s system? Let’s name them, honestly.

The erosion of autonomy lies at the heart of it all. Decisions are handed down in glossy folders and ready-made PowerPoints, with little regard for the children in front of us or the teacher who knows them best. Curriculums are pre-packaged and stripped of creativity, turned into scripts with no room for tangents, no space for curiosity, and no trust in the person delivering them. The joy of planning, of crafting something bespoke, responsive, alive, has been replaced by schemes written far from the classroom, yet deemed sacred.

CPD is rarely better. So often, it is directionless, hollow, or built for box-ticking. Sessions are delivered to the many, but useful to the few. It is not professional learning when it lacks purpose. It is not development when it doesn’t spark anything new.

Add to that the weight of endless demands: the unpaid hours spent chasing data, tweaking displays, leading clubs, covering classes, and completing policies, so many tasks that stretch far beyond the school day, creeping into weekends, bleeding into the spaces where joy should be. Teachers are tired. Not because they don’t care, but because they do.

And still, the pressure mounts.

The mental toll of feeling overwhelmed is deep and enduring. If teaching was only about the children, it would still be one of the hardest jobs in the world. But it never only is. There are meetings, interventions, accountability measures, and layers of responsibility added to already impossible days. Teachers live with the constant anxiety of not being enough, the dread of Monday mornings where there should be the quiet joy of returning to their class—the familiar faces, the spark of wonder, the chance to shape another week of discovery and connection. The whispers of “informal support plans” circle staffrooms, haunting even the most experienced. Educators who have spent decades lighting up classrooms are suddenly scrutinized, not for their impact on children, but for their unwillingness to ‘perform’ for leadership.

This is the hardest truth: many of the teachers now being deemed ineffective are the same ones who’ve held schools together for years. They’ve given everything. They’ve weathered change after change, stayed for the children, adapted time and again. Now, some are being pushed out for questioning decisions, for asking “why?”, for daring to speak up.

We are losing our strongest cohort; those who know, feel, and live this work. The ones we should be holding on to with both hands.

And hovering behind much of this pressure is the quiet, unspoken consequence of academisation. What began as a promise of innovation has too often fractured into a hierarchy-heavy system that siphons money upward and strips power away from those on the ground. CEOs of multi-academy trusts now earn more than the Prime Minister, while TAs, vital lifelines for children with SEND, are cut, stretched thin, or simply not replaced. There are too many chiefs, and not enough hands in the classroom. Collaboration across schools, once a strength of the system, has been lost to competitive cultures and fragmented visions. Fads come and go, initiatives are recycled, and staff nod along wearily - we’ve seen this before, and we know how it ends. Teachers are crying out for substance, not spectacle.

Behaviour issues are rising. Parental entitlement is growing. Teachers are expected to do more, with less, and to do it perfectly. Yet no one’s asking why behaviour is slipping. Perhaps it is because children too are suffocating under a curriculum that doesn’t meet their needs- content-heavy, test-driven, stripped of the magic of discovery. There’s little time for imagination, for talking, for joyful chaos. Perhaps children are frustrated because they feel it too: the loss of spark, the burnout in the room, the pressure trickling down from adult to child. Surely there’s a connection here.

When the classroom becomes a place of performance rather than possibility, everyone loses. But when lessons are allowed to breathe, when learning takes unexpected turns, when teachers feel empowered to follow a child's question down a winding path of wonder…..then magic returns. These are the moments both teacher and child remember. This is where relationships grow and learning lives.

And what of our new teachers? They enter the profession not to be artists, but operators. They are taught to deliver, not to lead. To implement, not to create. Yes, they need support. Yes, they need structure. But we have taken too much. We have flattened their freedom and left them with laminated plans and no space to find their voice. We are shaping a generation of educators who may never know the joy of teaching their way, and that is a deep and bitter loss.

Yet still, I hold fast to the belief that teaching is the most meaningful vocation of all. I spent twenty-five years in educational settings: twenty-two in the classroom and three in school improvement. The privilege of shaping young minds, of watching children grow in confidence, curiosity and skill, is unlike anything else… and it stays with you long after you leave the classroom. There is joy in knowing where to take a child next, in igniting that spark and walking alongside them as they discover what they’re capable of. I didn’t leave the classroom because I couldn’t manage the demands; teachers expect challenge. We know this work is hard. But what we don’t expect is to be undermined by systems that erode trust, strip autonomy, and reduce teaching to task delivery. Teachers are not work-shy; they are professionals who take pride in doing the job well. But what we are increasingly weary of is the culture of surveillance, the “you are not good enough” narrative, and the ever-growing layers of accountability that rarely centre the child. I left because the pressures made it harder to do the job properly, harder to teach responsively, creatively, with care and instinct. And I know I’m not alone.

So, what would I say to the teachers standing in the middle of this?

You are not the problem. You are not failing. You are standing strong in a system that has forgotten what it means to trust its teachers. Your exhaustion is not weakness, it is the mark of someone who has been giving everything to everyone, with little left for yourself. Your frustration is not a flaw, it is a signal that you still care, that you still believe in what education could be. If you are questioning, it is because you hold standards higher than the system allows. And if you are weary, it is because you’ve been carrying far too much, for far too long.

This profession does not need more policy. It needs protection. It needs leaders who listen and structures that serve. It needs space for teachers to bring themselves to their practice - not just their compliance, but their creativity, their instinct, their voice. Because when teachers are trusted, children thrive. When classrooms are freed from the tyranny of templates and targets, learning becomes what it was always meant to be: alive, human, full of possibility. If we want children to be inspired, we must first set their teachers free.

Let them teach.

Before we lose what matters most.

#TeacherPressure