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

Pavel Danilyuk/Pexels 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.