Teacher Burnout: Causes, Signs and What Schools Can Do

Teacher burnout affects teaching quality and school climate. Read about its causes, early warning signs and the steps school leadership can take to prevent it.

Messages from parents before the first lesson of the morning, crowded classrooms, the exam calendar, a changing curriculum, duty rotas, paperwork, students whose needs are becoming ever more varied, and parent groups that spill into the evening... Teaching carries a far heavier emotional and mental load than it appears to from the outside. Teacher burnout affects not only the teacher's own health but also the learning environment in the classroom, relationships with students and the overall climate of the school. An exhausted teacher may lose the enthusiasm they had when they first began, their patience with students may wear thin, or they may think about leaving the profession. In this article, for school principals, owners of private schools and tutoring centres, school counselling services and the HR departments of educational institutions, I look at the causes and early warning signs of burnout in teachers and the concrete steps institutions can take.

What Is Teacher Burnout?

The World Health Organization defines burnout as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It has three dimensions: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one's job, or negativity and cynicism related to it; and a reduced sense of professional efficacy. The WHO classifies it not as a medical condition but as an occupational phenomenon that should be used only in the work context (WHO, 2019).

In teachers, these three dimensions can look like this:

• Exhaustion: Waking up tired on Monday morning despite resting at the weekend, or holidays that are not enough to recover.
• Distancing: A cynical or indifferent attitude towards students and parents, the thought that "they won't change anyway", avoiding contact with students outside lessons.
• A sense of inadequacy: Thoughts such as "Nothing I do works" and "I'm not a good teacher".

I have covered the general symptoms of burnout and its individual side in detail in the article on burnout syndrome. Here the focus is on how schools and educational institutions can prevent this problem.

Factors That Lead to Burnout in Teachers

Teacher burnout does not stem from a single cause; many factors specific to the profession and the school environment come together:

• Workload and time pressure: Alongside teaching hours, there is preparation, assessment, paperwork, duty rotas, meetings, clubs and projects.
• Large classes and diverse needs: Attending at the same time to students with learning difficulties, attention problems, different language backgrounds or emotional difficulties in the same class.
• Parental pressure: The expectation of being constantly available, intense pressure over grades and exam results, and at times accusatory and aggressive communication.
• An exam-driven system: The achievement pressure that exams such as LGS and YKS (Turkey's national high-school and university entrance exams) create for students, parents and schools is passed on to the teacher.
• Frequently changing curricula and practices: The need to adapt to new programmes, methods and digital systems.
• Discipline problems and violence: Disrespect in the classroom, and verbal and physical attacks from students or parents.
• Lack of recognition and the way society values the profession: The feeling that effort goes unseen and that the profession is devalued in society.
• Economic pressures: Teachers who have to take on extra work because of the cost of living, the insecurity of contract and hourly-paid teachers, and worries about job security in private schools.
• Relationships with management: Little participation in decisions, and a management approach that is unsupportive or merely supervisory.

In the ESENER 2024 survey of European workplaces, 56% of workplaces cited "dealing with difficult customers, patients or pupils" as a risk factor (EU-OSHA, 2025). Educational institutions are among the settings where this risk is felt most clearly.

The general working climate in Turkey makes the picture worse. According to Gallup's 2026 report, 66% of employees in Turkey report experiencing a lot of stress daily, far above the global average (40%) (Gallup, 2026). Teachers work within this general stress, and on top of that they carry the heavy responsibility of other people's children's futures. Fear of stigma is added to this: in the OSH Pulse survey in Europe, 50% of workers think that disclosing a mental health problem would harm their career (EU-OSHA, 2022). The expectation that "a teacher must be strong and set an example" can lead many teachers to tell no one that they are struggling.

Communication with Parents and Availability Outside Working Hours

One of the factors that noticeably increases teachers' load today is that communication with parents does not respect working hours. Class groups on messaging apps, messages arriving in the evening and at weekends, and the expectation of an immediate reply to every message can mean that a teacher is never mentally able to leave work.

This has the following effects in particular:

• Rest and family time being interrupted
• Sleep problems caused by tense messages arriving before bedtime
• Fear of being criticised or complained about at any moment
• Worry about being seen as "uninterested" when the teacher sets their own boundaries

School management has an important role here: defining set hours and channels for communication with parents, establishing the school's official communication route for emergencies, and clearly supporting the teacher's right not to reply outside working hours. I have also covered the psychological effects of out-of-hours communication in the article on after-hours messages and the work-life boundary.

A teacher being able to rest without checking their phone in the evening is the precondition for the energy they bring into the classroom the next morning.

The Impact of Teacher Burnout on Students and the School

Burnout directly affects the teacher's presence in the classroom. An exhausted and distant teacher may find it hard to build a warm relationship with students; classroom management may rely more on punishment and shouting; and creative, interactive teaching methods may give way to routine lecturing. Students are affected by this climate too: motivation to learn, attachment to school and behaviour in the classroom are linked to the teacher's emotional state.

For the school, the consequences are as follows:

• Frequent sick leave and absence, gaps in lessons and difficulty finding cover
• Early retirement or departure of experienced teachers
• High staff turnover in private schools and the parent dissatisfaction that goes with it
• A negative climate in the staff room and conflicts within the team

Research also shows the long-term effects of burnout. A systematic review of 36 prospective studies found that burnout was associated with later insomnia, depressive symptoms, absenteeism, job dissatisfaction and presenteeism (Salvagioni et al., 2017).

Say a maths teacher with fifteen years' experience at a middle school has been entering every lesson reluctantly for the past two years, talks to no one in the staff room and often says, "I can't do this job any more." The principal may dismiss it as "a personal problem", or may talk to the teacher one-to-one and try to understand their load. In the conversation it may emerge that the teacher is responsible for LGS preparation in three different classes, receives constant messages from parents in the evenings and looks after an elderly mother at home. A small adjustment to the timetable and boundaries on parent communication could help this teacher regain their hold on the profession.

The Legal and Institutional Responsibility of School Management

Schools and private educational institutions are workplaces too. Under Article 4 of the Occupational Health and Safety Law No. 6331, the employer is obliged to ensure the work-related health and safety of employees. Article 5(f) of the Law requires the development of a coherent prevention policy covering the effects of factors related to work organisation, working conditions and social relationships. Article 8 of the Risk Assessment Regulation requires psychosocial sources of hazard to be identified and recorded as well.

In addition, Article 417 of the Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098 obliges the employer to take the necessary measures to protect employees from psychological harassment. Teachers' exposure to psychological violence from parents, students or managers should be assessed within this scope. Although the administrative structure works differently in state schools, responsibility for protecting and supporting teachers should be on the school management's agenda.

What Can Schools and Educational Institutions Do?

To prevent teacher burnout, it is not enough just to tell teachers to "look after yourself". Lasting change is possible through changes to how the school operates. The steps that can be taken are as follows:

1. Make workload visible and balance it: Share timetables, duty rotas, club and project responsibilities fairly, and avoid giving newly qualified teachers an excessive load.
2. Establish a parent communication policy: Clear rules on communication hours, channels and response times; teachers should not be left alone in the face of aggressive communication, and management should step in.
3. Take a clear stance against violence: Record verbal or physical attacks from students or parents and provide the teacher with legal and psychological support.
4. Increase participation in decision-making: Seeking teachers' views on the timetable, event planning and school rules strengthens their sense of control.
5. Train school leaders: In the WHO's guidelines on mental health at work, the best-evidenced recommendation is mental health training for managers (strong recommendation, moderate-certainty evidence) (WHO, 2022). It is critical that principals and deputy principals notice a struggling teacher and talk to them in a supportive way.
6. Support professional solidarity: Regular meetings where teachers share difficult cases, learn from one another and feel they are not alone.
7. Build stress management and classroom management skills: Stress management programmes based on cognitive behavioural principles are among the approaches showing the greatest effect among workplace interventions (Richardson and Rothstein, 2008).
8. Make recognition visible: Acknowledge teachers' effort concretely in meetings, parent announcements and school events.
9. Offer confidential psychological support: A support service from outside the school, based on confidentiality and suited to the teacher's working hours.

Some of these steps require a budget, but an important share of them require only a change in management approach. For example, adding a short "what is challenging us most this term?" item to every staff meeting, not deciding on a parent complaint without hearing the teacher, or sharing one teacher's success with the whole school are low-cost but effective practices. A teacher's feeling that "management has my back" is one of the strongest protective factors against burnout. Once that feeling is established, teachers say they are struggling earlier and problems can be addressed before they grow.

How to Get Started at Your Institution

1. Needs analysis: You can begin by examining teacher absence, staff turnover, and complaint and incident records. Then an anonymous burnout and psychosocial risk survey is given to teachers, and small focus-group discussions are held with teachers from different subjects and key stages. Questions such as "What is the most tiring part of your week?" and "When do you feel alone?" reveal the real pressure points of the school.

2. Programme: Based on the analysis, school-level policy changes (parent communication, allocation of duties, a violence protocol) and training for leaders and teachers are planned. The content of the programme is shaped by the school's needs, but generally covers the following topics: for leaders, noticing a struggling teacher and talking supportively; for teachers, stress and emotion regulation skills, managing difficult parent meetings, approaches to crisis moments in the classroom, and peer solidarity sessions. Involving the school counselling service in the process makes it easier to address student and teacher needs together. A structure that continues throughout the term and includes reinforcement sessions should be preferred to a one-off seminar. A meta-analysis of workplace resilience programmes found that the effect fades over time and that face-to-face formats are more effective (Vanhove et al., 2016). You can explore corporate training and consultancy options on the corporate services page.

3. Measurement: Repeat the surveys at the start and end of the term, and monitor changes in absence and staff turnover, the rate at which the support service is used and qualitative feedback from teachers together. The results are shared with the teachers' board and the next steps are decided together. Protecting teachers' identities in measurement is essential; especially in small schools, results should be reported only in aggregate, in a way that no one can be identified. Otherwise teachers will avoid answering the survey honestly and the measurement loses its meaning.

Frequently Asked Questions

When does teacher burnout increase most?

Exam periods, report-card and end-of-term periods, transitions to a new curriculum or new practices, and the last weeks of the school year are generally when the load is felt most intensely. However, burnout is the result of stress that builds up over a long time rather than of a single period.

Doesn't a holiday cure burnout?

A holiday provides rest, but if the working conditions that are the source of burnout have not changed, its effect is usually short-lived. When the teacher returns to school and meets the same load, symptoms can return quickly. That is why lasting solutions come from changes to how the school operates.

How should a school principal approach a burnt-out teacher?

They should talk one-to-one in a calm setting, mentioning the concrete changes they have observed, and without judgement. Trying to understand the teacher's load, discussing together the adjustments that are possible and, if necessary, giving information about confidential psychological support options all help.

Are newly qualified teachers at greater risk?

The first years of the profession can be particularly demanding in terms of classroom management, parent communication and workload. Guidance from an experienced colleague, a gradual increase in responsibilities and regular feedback help new teachers get through this period more healthily.

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• #parent communication

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Eda Erkan Alapala

Klinik Psikolog. İstanbul Kent Üniversitesi Klinik Psikoloji Tezli Yüksek Lisans mezunu; bilişsel davranışçı terapi, çocuk merkezli oyun terapisi ve çocuk-ergen psikoterapisi alanlarında eğitimlerini tamamlamıştır.

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