Our research found a new reason to keep teachers happy – it’s linked to how well students do

The OECD reports schools worldwide are under growing strain from teacher shortages. “It is getting harder to recruit, retain and deploy qualified teachers where they are most needed,” it has found.

Australia faces a similar picture. At least one third of Australian teachers say they intend to leave the profession before retirement. A 2023 survey found seven in ten teachers considered their workload unmanageable.

The usual policy response to these findings focus on retention: better pay, lighter workloads, clearer career paths. Those steps are worth taking for teachers’ own sake.

Our new research, published in Educational Psychology Review, points to a second reason to pay attention to how teachers are doing: their wellbeing also appears to matter for how students learn.

In other words, if teachers are happy, students learn more.

Happy teacher, good outcomes?

Researchers have suspected for some time a teacher’s own wellbeing, or the lack of it, such as burnout, exhaustion or stress, is linked to the classroom and how students do.

But the evidence was scattered across many smaller, disconnected studies, with no single estimate of how large, or how reliable, these links actually are. We wanted to change that.

So colleagues and I searched for all available studies measuring the relationship between teacher’s wellbeing or lack of wellbeing and student motivation or academic achievement.

Our study

We ended up analysing 186 studies and data from more than 350,000 teachers worldwide – the largest synthesis of this evidence gathered to date. The search covered primary, secondary and combined schools across 33 countries. The studies were published between 1977 and 2023.

We defined teacher wellbeing broadly, to include factors such as self-efficacy (the belief in one’s capacity to do a job), job satisfaction and commitment, work motivation, and general psychological functioning such as positive mood and the ability to cope with demands.

Teacher “illbeing” covered the flip side. It was characterised by burnout, stress, depression and anxiety and other signs of psychological strain.

For student outcomes, we looked at academic achievement (grades, test scores and similar performance measures) and motivation (such as student’s interest in learning, the goals they set, and their belief in their own ability).

What we found

Our study found teachers’ wellbeing was reliably linked to higher student motivation and achievement.

Teacher “illbeing” showed the opposite pattern, with a slightly weaker association.

This means when teacher wellbeing was high, student outcomes in terms of exams results and motivation to learn were good, while when teacher illbeing was high, student outcomes were poor.

Teachers with higher job satisfaction, work motivation or general psychological functioning all showed similarly sized links to better student outcomes.

Why high school might be different

We found the link between teacher wellbeing and student outcomes was stronger in high schools than in primary schools. This may be connected with how students’ lives change as they get older.

Younger children are shaped by a wider range of influences, including their parents, and parental influence tends to decline across the school years.

As students progress into high school, they gain more independence over their learning, but rely more on teachers for academic guidance. This could explain why their teachers’ wellbeing is more influential than for younger students.

The same pattern, however, did not appear for teacher illbeing, and we do not yet have a good explanation for that.

Why are seeing this?

One theory suggests teachers whose own needs for autonomy, competence and connection are met are more likely to teach in ways that support their students’ autonomy and motivation.

A related idea, suggests teachers who are doing well are better placed to manage their classroom, build stronger relationships with students, and teach in ways that support students’ own motivation.

Both are plausible explanations, but we did not test them directly in our study.

These findings come with some limitations

The associations we found were small to moderate in size. This means they are consistent enough across studies to take seriously. But were not the only factor linked to how a student does in a given year. They were also similar in size to other well-established factors in school research. For example, we know there is a relationship between the quality of teacher’s relationship with their students and students’ motivation to learn.

The evidence is also correlational. This means we cannot say improving teacher wellbeing causes better student outcomes. What we can say is the two tend to move together. A supportive school leader, for example, could lift a teacher’s wellbeing and a school’s academic culture at the same time, without one causing the other.

How can we help teachers’ wellbeing?

Workload is the most commonly cited source of teacher stress. So policymakers need to keep looking at how to match workload to teaching hours.

It also means investing in the support shown to help teachers cope, such as manageable workloads, supportive school leadership, and strong collegial relationships.

These are not quick fixes and they require investment. But our findings suggest they are worth making for the students in the classroom, not only the teachers in front of it.