Why Teacher Flourishing Is the Foundation of Student Flourishing

If we want young people to flourish, we need to pay far more attention to the adults who spend their days alongside them.

Schools have become increasingly attentive to student wellbeing. We talk about resilience, belonging, relationships, mental health, emotional regulation and creating environments in which young people can thrive. This represents an important shift in education. Academic

achievement matters, but it cannot tell us everything about whether a young person is doing well.

Yet there is a contradiction sitting quietly underneath some of this work. We can teach students about balance while their teachers work late into the evening. We can encourage young people to ask for help while the adults around them quietly believe they should be able to cope. We can speak about belonging while teachers feel exhausted, undervalued or increasingly disconnected from the communities in which they work.

If flourishing is genuinely one of the purposes of education, then we need to pay attention to whether the people responsible for creating the conditions for student flourishing are themselves able to flourish.

Teacher flourishing is certainly not the only foundation of student flourishing. Family, friendships, health, culture, community and the circumstances of a young person’s life all matter enormously. But teachers are part of the environment students encounter for thousands of hours during their years at school. How those adults experience their work matters.

During my years as a school principal, some of the conversations that stayed with me most were with teachers who, from the outside, appeared to be coping perfectly well. They were still teaching good lessons, turning up to meetings, caring for students and meeting deadlines. Yet underneath all that competence, some were running on empty.

That taught me something important: continued functioning is not necessarily evidence of flourishing.

Good people can compensate for difficult conditions for a remarkably long time. They work harder. They stay later. They carry things home. They absorb another change, another responsibility or another student who needs more from them. Because they care deeply about their work, they often keep going long after the work has become personally costly. Schools can easily mistake that commitment for capacity.

Eventually, however, depletion shows up somewhere. It may appear as tiredness, impatience or withdrawal. A teacher who once volunteered readily begins protecting every remaining piece of time. Creativity becomes harder. Conversations that once felt relational become more

transactional. Responding patiently to the student who needs something extra requires more effort than it once did. That does not make someone a poor teacher. It makes them human.

Research gives us good reason to take this relationship seriously. A systematic review by Daniel Madigan and Lisa Kim found evidence linking teacher burnout with poorer academic achievement and lower-quality student motivation, while also noting that the evidence concerning student wellbeing itself was limited. More recently, OECD analysis of PISA data found that teachers who reported sufficient time for their work, better work–life balance and greater job satisfaction were more likely to report positive teacher–student relationships and supportive classroom environments.

The evidence therefore does not support a simplistic equation in which flourishing teachers automatically produce flourishing students. What it does suggest is that the experience of teachers helps shape the relational and educational environment in which students learn. Teacher flourishing is not an optional extra sitting alongside the ‘real work’ of education. It is part of the environment in which that work happens.

Beyond wellbeing activities

This is where schools need to be careful. There is nothing wrong with morning teas, exercise programmes, mindfulness sessions or other initiatives designed to support staff. They may be valuable and genuinely appreciated. But they cannot compensate indefinitely for organisational conditions that continually deplete people.

Wellbeing can too easily become one more responsibility placed on tired teachers: manage your stress, build your resilience, practise gratitude, sleep better, establish boundaries. Personal responsibility matters, of course. We each have some responsibility for how we live and work. But flourishing is never entirely an individual achievement. People flourish within conditions.

For school leaders, that means looking beyond wellbeing programmes to the experience of work itself. Feeling valued involves much more than occasional praise. It is communicated through everyday relationships and decisions: whether people are listened to, whether their expertise is respected, whether contribution is noticed and whether someone experiencing

difficulty is approached with curiosity before judgement.

At its heart, this is about dignity. People need to experience themselves as persons rather than simply as resources required to deliver an organisational plan.

Agency matters as well. Teachers are professionals, and healthy professional cultures combine accountability with trust. Expectations can be clear while teachers still have room to exercise judgement, creativity and professional expertise. Excessive control may produce compliance, but it rarely creates the conditions in which people bring energy and ownership to their work.

Workload belongs in the same conversation. Schools cannot eliminate pressure, and meaningful work will sometimes be demanding. There will always be seasons when people are stretched. But being stretched for a period is very different from living in a permanent state of depletion.

Sometimes supporting wellbeing means adding something. Often it means removing something.

Leaders need to examine meeting schedules, administrative requirements, data collection, communication expectations and the steady accumulation of small tasks that individually appear reasonable but collectively consume significant amounts of time and energy. A new initiative may need to replace an old one. A meeting that no longer serves a clear purpose can disappear. An email written late at night can usually wait until morning.

These may appear to be small organisational decisions, but together they communicate what a school believes about the people who work there.

Making it safe to struggle

One of the clearest signs of a healthy professional culture is whether people can speak honestly about how they are travelling. A teacher should be able to say, ‘I’m struggling with this’, without immediately fearing that the admission will be interpreted as incompetence.

Psychological safety does not emerge because it appears in a strategic plan. It grows through repeated experiences of how people are treated when things go wrong, when they make mistakes, when they ask for help or when they acknowledge that their capacity is stretched.

Leadership behaviour matters enormously in creating those conditions. Staff notice when leaders never stop. They notice when messages routinely arrive late at night. They notice when every request is presented as urgent. Leaders may never explicitly tell people that they should always be available, but expectations are often communicated through behaviour long before they appear in policy.

The reverse is equally powerful. A leader who can say, ‘I got that wrong’, makes it safer for others to acknowledge mistakes. A leader who says, ‘This can wait until tomorrow’, communicates something about boundaries. A leader who notices that someone is carrying too much and actually helps remove something from their load demonstrates that wellbeing is more than rhetoric.

Culture is built through these ordinary moments.

Perhaps this gives school leaders three useful questions to carry into their next conversation about staff wellbeing: What are we asking our people to carry? What are we doing that unnecessarily drains their energy? Do the people who work here genuinely experience dignity, agency and belonging?

These questions move us beyond staff wellbeing as a collection of activities and towards flourishing as a way of thinking about the organisation itself.

A flourishing school will never be a place where everyone is happy all the time. Schools are complicated human communities. There will be pressure, disagreement, disappointment and difficult seasons. The goal is something more realistic and more important: creating a place

where people can undertake meaningful and demanding work without continually sacrificing themselves in order to do it.

Students learn about flourishing partly through what we explicitly teach them. They also learn through what they experience around them. They notice whether adults have time for one another. They see how mistakes are treated. They observe whether achievement seems to require exhaustion, whether asking for help is safe and whether people are valued for more than what they produce.

Tomorrow morning, long before the first wellbeing lesson begins, students will walk through school gates and into classrooms. They will encounter teachers carrying all the ordinary complexity of being human: some energetic, some worried, some tired, some dealing with things their students will never know about.

The responsibility of a school is not to make those teachers endlessly happy. It is to create conditions in which demanding and meaningful work does not steadily diminish the people doing it.

If we want teachers to create places in which young people have a genuine opportunity to flourish, then we must create places in which teachers have that opportunity too.

Reference

Murray, Andrew. 2026. Faith, Flourishing and Well-being. Melbourne: Garratt Publishing.

Madigan, Daniel J., and Lisa E. Kim. 2021. ‘Does Teacher Burnout Affect Students? A Systematic Review of Its Association with Academic Achievement and Student-Reported Outcomes.’ International Journal of Educational Research 105: 101714. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2020.101714

About the Author

Andrew Murray is an educational consultant, author and former secondary school principal from Aotearoa New Zealand. A PhD candidate at Australian Catholic University and a 2026 Boston College International Research Fellow, his work focuses on leadership, wellbeing and human flourishing - particularly how schools can create conditions in which people thrive.

THE HUMAN FLOURISHING SERIES EXPLORING EDUCATION, LEADERSHIP, AND HUMAN POTENTIAL. - PART 3 OF 4