What does teacher burnout mean for students and tutors?

2025 is shaping up to be one of the trickiest on record for our teachers and students. 

It is being widely reported that teacher burnout is on the rise and, given the state of the British economy and a cash-strapped Government beleaguered by crises across the public sector, there doesn’t seem to be much hope on the horizon for teaching staff.

An unpalatable cocktail of issues at our schools has seen The Guardian newspaper report earlier this year that teacher vacancies in England are at an all-time high. Six teaching posts in every 1,000 were left unfilled in 2024, double the rate of vacancies recorded before the Covid pandemic in 2020 when mainstream employment schedules first went ‘remote’, and a staggering six times as high as the first ever measure by the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER), back in 2010. 

It’s easy to see how increasing staff vacancies quickly escalate into teacher burnout but what does this mean for students and tutors? The knock-on effect on students as it essentially poses a substantial risk to the quality of our children's education but how can tutors help?

Staffing Shortages & Funding Shortfalls at School

Shortages in staff means teachers are left to pick up the slack by managing larger class sizes than usual, as well as picking up subjects they would not have previously taught, or even studied themselves. This not only impacts the quality of that teaching, particularly in Maths and Science where teaching vacancies are largest, but bloated class sizes and fewer office hours means teachers are understandably unable to attend to the individual needs of their pupils to the degree that they might want – or those pupils need.

Although the Labour party promised in its election manifesto last year to recruit more than 6,500 new teachers — a pledge that was claimed to be paid for by the 20 per cent VAT hike on private school fees — news outlets like The Telegraph have recently signalled that the Government is nowhere near that recruitment target and, as a consequence, our education system remains in what the General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, Pepe Di’Lasio, calls a system ”teetering on the brink of collapse.”

Staffing shortages and cash strapped budgets means schools across the country are having to plug finance gaps with funding intended for other areas: SEN, extra-curricular programmes, class trips and sport facilities and equipment. 

Deteriorating Student Behaviour

Most alarming of all is the increase in challenging behaviour from students since the Covid pandemic, as figures reveal a substantial rise in the number of pupils being suspended and expelled in England. Figures from the Department for Education (DfE) show more pupils being suspended regularly, and for longer periods, than before the pandemic struck. The number of suspensions issued by schools doubled between 2019 and 2023.  

This chimes with anecdotal reports that teachers are spending too much time handling behaviour concerns with students, shunting lesson planning, marking and other classroom administration to address behavioural issues they are in all likelihood ill-equipped to support.

What does this mean for students and tutors?

The sad news is that students are at risk of being overlooked or undernourished by their teachers in schools whose staff are underpaid and overworked. My own conversations with parents in the past year speak to this experience. Parents have spoken of their children losing interest in subjects they once loved because a beloved teacher has vacated their school or a new one has arrived who perhaps lacks the curriculum understanding to really articulate ideas that would otherwise engage and inspire. 

If you’re noticing changes in your children’s behaviour, it’s really worth speaking to them about their classroom experience. What are they enjoying? What are they not engaging with — and why? It would be wrong to lay the blame for this at an individual school or teacher, but we can poke the finger at a state education system that has long begun to creak under issues arising from more than decade of under investment from the Government and a policy-making process too slow to adapt to the preferences of an evolving job market that places remote working and a clearer boundary between work and life at their heart of its value system. 

For the tutors to whom concerned parents might want to turn at a time like this, our job is to go beyond providing the knowledge that has been missed in the classroom; to go beyond simply disseminating curricula, but to provide holistic pastoral care to the students we meet both online and in person. To be a friend and a mentor as much as a teacher and lecturer.

As a tutor who fell in love with his subject in secondary school, it’s heart-breaking for me to hear of students losing interest in subjects they once loved because of social distraction from overcrowded classrooms and teaching that is left wanting in excitement and understanding. 

However there is opportunity in crisis for our tutors.

Every new student we meet should offer us another opportunity to share why we love the subject we teach and inspire students to do the same. These unsettling times for students should be a rallying cry for tutors to become the aid that is missing in schools, for the better of our children' s education but also our colleagues in education at schools across the country.

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Blog Post Crafted by Will

William read English Literature at Cambridge University. He wrote plays for the ADC Theatre, winning the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Other Prize in 2015.

He studied for an MSt in Creative Writing at Oxford University, before moving to New York City, completing an MFA in Fiction at Columbia University as a Chair’s Fellow.

Passionate about literature, Will loves to share his passion for reading and writing with the students he tutors.