Résumé en français : élèves agressifs, parents indifférents, règlements constamment modifiés... le métier de professeur est statistiquement 2 fois plus stressant que la moyenne.

Is teaching a good job? The UK Health and Safety Executive has reported on findings that show that while 20% of British people have said they experienced “high levels of stress at work,” that figure rises to a worrying 41% when teachers were asked.
To give some indication of other professions, 31% of nurses reported high stress and 27% of managers.

Whether the stress is ‘objective,’ in terms of increased blood-pressure or chances or a heart attack, or ‘subjectively-felt’ is said, by the report, to be in some ways “irrelevant” – as “perception is all.”

Teachers get long holidays and, in the UK, their wages have risen under 13 years of Labour government; yet they are continually asked to adapt to new “government initiatives” which seem to be proposed on repeated and regular basis. They monitor and check teachers and oblige them to change their method, principally of evaluation, to fit in with new exams and grading.

This is reported to stress teachers considerably. For example, in the UK 22% of sick leave is down to stress, in France it’s 1%.

Both French and English teachers find it hard to cope with difficult classroom behaviour – pupils noisy and disruptive – the result of a society increasingly unable to identify the point of much education and why they should respect or invest authority in a teacher. Pupil behaviour is still perceived as the principal cause for teachers quitting the job (half of English teachers have thought about leaving the profession).

It’s not just the pupils. French and English teachers say they suffer from a lack of recognised social status in wider society and incomprehension and indifference on the part of parents.
Interestingly, in the UK, pupil behaviour was not cited as the principal reason for stress and phone calls to the Teacher Support Line. Most complaints were about conflict with managers, colleagues, parents or school governors (interested parties that sit on school management committees in the UK, who don’t have to have a specific relation to the school).

The lower stress levels reported by teachers in France, despite the fact they are generally seen as being paid less than their English equivalents, might have something to do with the shorter hours they work and the fact that they don’t have to remain in school when they are not teaching in a classroom; teachers in England are expected to be there 9 to 5.

French teachers are seen to have an “easy job” in England, yet French TV is always showing images of young teachers in “difficult” areas – ZEPs – who suffer the threat of violence from their pupils. French teachers who work in zones with catchment areas including zones of extreme poverty and desperation are more exposed and are seen by French society as a whole as living at the “cutting edge” of deep divisions in the country that most of the time people do not want to acknowledge.