School teachers are burning out at alarming rates. How can we help keep them happy in their jobs?

More than a third of Australian teachers say they plan to leave the profession before retirement, while a further third say they are unsure of their career plans.

High levels of stress and burnout are cited as key factors behind teaching turnover. A 2025 Australian study found 90% of teachers reported severe levels of stress, while rates of depression and anxiety symptoms were more than double the national average.

High levels of distress and turnover don’t just affect teachers. They disrupt student learning and place further pressure on school systems, particularly in disadvantaged communities.

But teachers with higher wellbeing tend to have stronger relationships with students and better outcomes in the classroom.

So, supporting teachers’ wellbeing is crucial for retaining teachers, while also promoting high-quality teaching and learning.

How can we do this? Our new research provides some clues.

What we already knew

Many efforts to support teachers have focused on reducing stress and managing burnout through approaches such as stress-management training. But supporting teacher wellbeing means more than stepping in once they are already overwhelmed and ready to leave the profession.

So there is growing attention on how to create the personal and environmental conditions that enable teachers to thrive, rather than simply addressing problems once they arise.

In our research, we focus on positive psychology interventions because they aim to help teachers stay well, motivated and fulfilled in their work, despite the pressures they face. These can involve mindfulness, resilience training, social-emotional learning (involving emotional skills and care for others), gratitude practices, or several approaches at once.

Previous reviews of positive psychology interventions for teachers suggest they are often associated with positive effects. But the evidence remains fragmented.

Our research

Our research aimed to make sense of this confusion through a scoping review.

We wanted to understand what’s being done around the world to proactively improve teacher wellbeing, what outcomes are being measured, whether these approaches appear to work, and how they might be better implemented.

In total, we reviewed 247 studies spanning 25 years of research across 42 countries, including the United States, China, England, Australia and Canada.

What did we find?

The most frequently identified approaches, and those most consistently associated with improvements in wellbeing and reduced stress and burnout, were:

• Socio-emotional learning: this combines emotional skills and compassion training to help teachers regulate their emotions, build relationships with others, and create more supportive classrooms for themselves and their students.

• Mindfulness-based approaches: these develop self-awareness, attention to the present moment and a non-judgemental attitude towards thoughts and emotions.

• Combined wellbeing approaches: these target different areas of teachers’ wellbeing, including their emotions, relationships, sense of purpose and professional growth. Examples include using personal strengths at work, expressing gratitude to colleagues and focusing on what gives their work meaning.

What does this mean overall?

These interventions typically aimed to strengthen self-regulation skills, enhance teacher self-efficacy (belief in their teaching capabilities), and cultivate positive relationships with students and colleagues to promote wellbeing and resilience.

However, the studies we examined varied widely in their design and often relied on self-reported, short-term outcomes. This highlights the need for more rigorous research into whether these benefits last over time.

What can we do to prevent burnout?

Three practical messages stand out from our findings.

1. Mindfulness matters

Mindfulness was an important component of many teacher wellbeing interventions, but it is often misunderstood as simply a “stress-reduction technique” or formal meditation.

Mindfulness is about how we pay attention and how we relate and respond to what shows up in our minds. For a teacher, this might mean noticing early signs of frustration or stress during a difficult classroom interaction, pausing before these feelings escalate, and choosing a more considered response.

Limited time and difficulty applying mindfulness during the school day were common barriers in the studies we reviewed. Given this, schools could help teachers develop brief, informal mindfulness practices during their daily routines.

2. Relationships matter

Our review suggests relationships are central to teacher wellbeing. Supportive colleagues can make even the toughest days feel more manageable and the good days even more rewarding. Positive relationships with students can provide a powerful sense of purpose and remind teachers of the difference they make.

How teachers relate to themselves matters, too. Having self-compassion means recognising difficult days and mistakes are part of being human, rather than allowing them to become reasons to question your worth or ability as a teacher.

In practice, strengthening relationships could mean improving how teachers communicate and connect through skills such as active listening (fully concentrating on what someone is saying), taking other people’s perspectives and classroom management (the strategies teachers use to manage behaviour and learning).

Schools could also create space for teachers to openly share struggles with difficult student behaviour, parent interactions and other common challenges. This can help cultivate a sense of belonging, remind teachers they’re not alone in these experiences and work through solutions collaboratively.

3. Of course, working conditions also matter

Wellbeing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Supporting teachers also means being realistic about the expectations placed on them, addressing excessive workloads and creating a school culture where staff wellbeing is genuinely prioritised.

This includes considering how teachers’ work is designed and organised, rather than simply giving teachers more strategies to cope with increasing demands.

For individual teachers, this could involve taking a more active role in the shape of their work through job crafting. This involves making changes to your job, of your own initiative, to make it more meaningful.

For school leaders and policymakers, this could mean removing unnecessary demands, while giving teachers a meaningful say in how their work is designed and how their wellbeing is supported. One obvious example is reducing administrative work, which teachers’ consistently say takes them away from their students and contributes to their stress levels.

However, no two schools face exactly the same challenges. Approaches such as co-design, where teachers work alongside school leaders to identify problems and shape solutions, can help ensure changes reflect the needs and realities of each school.

Read more: Our research shows how ‘job crafting’ can help teachers manage and enjoy their stressful work