'teaching was what made me happy, but covid and doing it online left me a broken person'

Katie Russell 19 January 2021 3:45pm GMT Mental Health Emergency “My job is the thing that makes me happiest,” says Rachel Spedding, who, for the past seven years, has been an English and

drama teacher in a comprehensive secondary school in East London. Her job is very important to her. “My main identity is as a teacher, it’s not as a human who happens to have a job in

education – it’s as a teacher.” Teaching gives her purpose – especially working with students from disadvantaged backgrounds. “Education empowers choice and change for everyone – so a sense

of purpose comes from the idea that, in some ways, you are making some improvement in that child’s life, in whatever form that might be. That is the most empowering part of my job.” Yet over

the past year, the Covid-19 pandemic has so drastically altered the education sector that Spedding had what she describes as a “mental health breakdown” in July, and had to be signed off

work.  When schools closed for the first time in March, she was in “absolute despair” because she would not be able to work face-to-face with pupils. “It came with a lot of worry and

concerns because you no longer feel that you are keeping children safe,” she says.  “There were students we didn’t see for weeks on end, there were students who couldn’t access online

learning, and there were students who were technically on the online lesson but never spoke once, never turned their cameras on, so it’s a real struggle to understand if students are

accessing the learning. You lose touch with a lot of the students.” In other cases, she was given a deeper insight into the tumultuous home lives of some of her students. “There were times

where you would hear people in the background of my students screaming and shouting,” she recalls. Other times, she could simply “see the disadvantage or the poverty” in the work environment

of some pupils. Due to Covid-19, the usual tools for dealing with these sorts of issues were no longer available, and Spedding couldn’t do anything to help. “I felt like I wasn’t able to

address the needs and yet the needs were explicitly screaming out that they needed to be addressed.” This was demoralising for her – and made her work feel “less impactful”, as she wasn’t

able to help those students. “If you’re a teacher or if you’re in any kind of job where your main objective is to support and help, when you feel you’re not doing that, you do feel

helpless,” she says.  Working from home also took a toll as it blurred the boundaries between work and home life. It didn’t help that she was working in a flat with five flatmates, where

“tensions were high” due to their clashing personalities. “I was really finding it hard to find any balance, and the fusion of the worlds – which was my workplace and then the unhappiness of

my flat – was not working very well,” Spedding recalls. She packed a suitcase and spent a few nights in a hotel in July to get a break from her housemates. Whilst she was there, she got the

news that a close friend of hers from university had passed away from cancer.  It was this that tipped her over the edge. She called her father, and he picked her up from the hotel and took

her away from London. She stayed with her father for a month.  “There were a good 3 or 4 weeks where I was just existing and eating and sleeping and that was about it,” she says.  She

didn’t initially recognise that she had a mental health problem. “I hadn’t known that mental health issues had so many physical side effects – I was constantly sleeping for hours and hours,

and as someone who is a high-energy person I was sleeping and even when I woke up I’d then be tired, I’d feel immense apathy, I had no real drive to do anything.” She was also suffering with

anxiety. “[I was] just a total broken person. It feels almost like it wasn’t me when I talk about it now.” She called the doctor and was signed off work for low mood and anxiety from July

until December. She hasn’t returned full-time to London since, and is currently staying with an aunt in the North East of England.  How much, I ask, was teaching responsible for her mental

ill health? Spedding is quick to correct me. “I wouldn’t say that teaching caused my mental health issue, I’d say that the circumstances and the situation of online teaching, and this Covid

teaching, has contributed to it.” Spedding is not the only teacher whose mental health has struggled due to the impact of the pandemic on their profession.  Rosie Thomas, 25, a drama teacher

in a comprehensive school in Fulham, has found it a stressful time. The constant U-turns have epecially taken a toll – most notably, the decision to close the schools again in January.

“That fast-changing atmosphere is really draining and really hard,” Thomas says. Teachers have had to put on a brave face for the pupils, too. “Teaching is that kind of job where you have to

be outwardly very positive and certain at all times and that's really difficult when you have no idea what’s going on”.  Now that the pandemic has been going on for so long, “it’s hard

to stay motivated and positive,” Thomas says. The novelty of the first lockdown has worn off now. “We’ve been doing online lessons for 10 months – they’re bored of them, we’re bored of

them. It’s not the job that you signed up to do, so staying motivated through that is really tough” She also echoes Spedding’s sentiments that she has not been able to do her job properly

due to the pandemic – mostly, her drama pupils have been focusing on theory or sending in videos of themselves performing. “The thing you need teachers for is not to make the worksheets and

tell them what to do,” Thomas says. “You need teachers to explain and add clarity and give support to people who have different abilities and be there in the room to guide them through what

they’re working on – that’s the whole point of teachers.  “What we’re offering now is educational – but I don’t think it’s an education.” This has, she says, been “disheartening”. Meanwhile,

PE teacher Jim Sanderson has found the shift to working from home to be challenging, too – particularly in the first lockdown. “We just had no structure to our days,” he says.  It was hard

to stay motivated – especially when a lot of the children weren’t taking part in the exercise challenges he and his colleagues were sending round. By mid-May, he was finding it hard to stay

focused. “There were days where for six or seven hours I’d work all day and then there were days where I slept for 12 hours, where I felt like crap and didn’t want to do anything.” Some days

he would start work at 7am, other times at 5pm. He describes this time as a “wobble”, and says his mental health is now much better. Thomas, too, says her mental health is now fine

(although she adds she is “not thriving”). Rachel Spedding went back to work just before Christmas and is working part-time. She finds her job more manageable now and “went into online

teaching with gusto” this year. Some of the issues from the previous lockdown have been addressed, too, with more vulnerable children being identified and supported at school. Currently, her

mental health is “under construction,” she says. “There’s no real sense of when I’m going to be fully recovered – if that even is a thing,” she adds. But she sees her mental health as a

long-term project that will take a couple of years to rebuild fully.  * How has lockdown impacted your mental health? We want to hear from you