ABSTRACT
There is certainly evidence to suggest that ‘stress’, whether or not it is engendered by the job, is a frequent companion of chronic illness in teachers. In our study of teachers who were granted early retirement on the grounds of ill health during 12 months at the end of the 1990s
(Bowers and McIver, 2000), we found that in 48 per cent of all cases, mental health problems were instrumental in the Teachers’ Pensions Division’s decision to grant retirement. Stress is not an official category of illness, but depression, which appears to have been the term applied in nearly all of the cases examined, was recounted as stemming from stress-related experiences. Mental health difficulties constituted more than twice the figure for the most frequently reported physical condition leading to ill-health retirement. On the other hand, when we looked generally at teacher absence in the public sector, there was less to indicate a direct link between stress and absenteeism. For example, the area in which the lowest number (59 per cent) of teachers took any time off at all from work (the East Midlands) was also the area where the overall time lost by teachers (nearly 3.6 per cent) was among the highest in the country. Yet in outer London, where 75 per cent of teachers were away from work at some point during the year, the average time lost (2. 5 per cent) was the lowest in the country. From this we might infer that teachers who take a small amount of time off when necessary may be better able to cope with the demands of the job than those who report unremittingly for work. How such data sit with notions of motivation, attitude and morale is unclear. What is patently obvious, however, is that different ways of measuring absenteeism can often yield very different results.
