What is it like being a Student Wellbeing Leader?
- Working with the most vulnerable students.
- Being the person who is called when things go wrong.
- Getting the support that your students need, or not.
- Being a counsellor.
- Making a visible difference for many students.
- Being able to do something beyond what most teachers can.
If you’re passionate about being a teacher (which many of us naturally are) and you want to be able to do more for your students, you may consider becoming a Student Wellbeing Leader. It is a leadership position that exists in many Australian schools, and it may be where you want to end up in your career.
There are many reasons why teachers take leadership positions. You may want to spend a little less time in the classroom for a while to focus on helping a broader range of students at your school, but the increase in pay is also nice.
Being a Student Wellbeing Leader is not a walk in the park, though. While this position looks very different in each school, there are a couple of common similarities. If you are thinking about becoming a Student Wellbeing Leader, you first need to be aware of what the job entails:
Working with the most vulnerable students.
This can be an absolute blessing, but it can also be a burden. As a Student Wellbeing Leader, it will be your job to support the well-being of all of the students at your school, but particularly your most vulnerable students.
Vicarious trauma can be a big problem for teachers, and Student Wellbeing Leaders are at particular risk because of how many struggling students they interact with every day. They are often the person who will take the time to talk to a student in-depth when they are not doing well, and this can take a toll on your own mental health.
Emotional burn-out is a real thing that often goes unaddressed with teachers, and as a Student Wellbeing Leader you need to make sure that you are ready for this part of your load. We need great teachers and great Student Wellbeing Leaders, but these are the people who often care an awful lot about their students and so are more prone to emotional burn-out.
Being the person who is called when things go wrong.
As a teacher, you work with students every day. In your class, you’ll have a wide variety of learners with a huge number of individual problems and needs. As a Student Wellbeing Leader, you will be the person that teachers call when they don’t know what to do.
As a Student Wellbeing Leader, you will be called in to help with all of the cases that teachers at your school are having difficulty managing themselves. You will need to be familiar with a wider range of students and their backgrounds, issues, and strategies in order to support teachers to do the best job that they can do.
Aside from the fact that you will be dealing with this, you will also often be called in to help throughout the day. You might be in the middle of something and suddenly have a student who has run off that you need to find, or have a student sitting in your office after having a melt-down. The unpredictability of your job is heightened, and this can also take a toll.
This additional toll can be on your mental wellbeing – if your job is unpredictable, it can be difficult to get into a routine and it can heighten anxiety1. It also might mean that you’re struggling to get work done that you need to do to get the best outcomes for your students. This is all something to keep in mind if you’re interested in becoming a Student Wellbeing Leader.
Getting the support that your students need, or not.
One of your key roles as a Student Wellbeing Leader will be to help coordinate all of the support around a student. You will be a point of contact between health professionals, families, and the school. You will also be leading applications for additional funding and allocating how that funding is spent to best support each student.
This can be a huge feel-good part of the job; when you manage to get everything working together to get the student the help that they need. In many school systems across the world though, this is not easy. It takes a great deal of skill to be able to implement this support for a student, and often the results are heavily impacted by factors outside of your control.
If a psychologist does not write a particular strategy as a recommendation in their report, it’s going to be a fight to get funding to implement this strategy. If the parents won’t return your calls, you often can’t initiate many of the processes that are needed to help this student. While you can have a profound impact on each student’s life, as a Student Wellbeing Leader you will often know exactly why this student is not getting what they need and that there is absolutely nothing that you can do about it.
Being a counsellor.
Teaching has a terrible habit of employing people who are trained as teachers to do things that aren’t teaching. Depending on which school you are actually working for, Student Wellbeing Leaders are often expected to undertake the role of a counselor as well. Some schools will even take it to the point of putting ‘Student Counselor’ in your job title.
Counselling is a complex profession which has a lot of moving parts. As a counselor, you will be expected to help students with a lot of things that are outside of your training as a teacher. Many teachers do not have specific mental health training, especially when it comes to responding in a crisis situation and how to access the types of support that our students need. This training is often not required to become a Student Wellbeing Leader in a school.
Counselling is its own profession with courses and degrees required to be registered in many countries. Assuming that teachers have the skills necessary to do this job is incredibly dangerous. This is amplified when those trained as teachers and not counsellors are called counsellors, as it means that our students are unlikely to seek additional support from a trained professional.
Making a visible difference for many students.
I’ve been awfully negative so far, but I want to also emphasise that there are some wonderful parts of being a Student Wellbeing Leader as well. One of the reasons why many teachers choose this profession is that they can see the impact that they are having on their students every day. As a Student Wellbeing Leader who is working one-on-one with some of the most vulnerable students in your school, this impact is even more noticeable and profound.
Being able to do something beyond what most teachers can.
As a teacher, you can sometimes feel helpless to support some of your students with the highest needs. You will need to defer to someone like a Student Wellbeing Leader who can put broader systems and adjustments in place to support every student. As a Student Wellbeing Leader, you can take action to support many students that are seriously struggling and whose teachers don’t know what else they can do.
So should I be a Student Wellbeing Leader?
Being a Student Wellbeing Leader is difficult. You’re exposed to a lot of the stressors that make teachers quit the profession to a much higher degree. You’re also exposed to a lot of the wonderful things that make teachers want to stay in the profession as well.
If you are at all considering applying for a job as a Student Wellbeing Leader, it is always worth the risk. You never quite know how you will fit into the role unless you try, and you may be kicking yourself if you never even gave it a shot.
That being said, if you’re at all hesitant about applying for a position as a Student Wellbeing Leader because of the stress, it might be a good idea to leave it for now. This is a situation where it may be best to go with your gut and not take other people’s opinions about what a good job you’ll do into consideration. If you feel like you’ll regret not trying though, you can always apply for a short-term position to test it out.
References:
1Niedhammer, I., Lesuffleur, T., Algava, E., & Chastang, J. F. (2015). Classic and emergent psychosocial work factors and mental health. Occupational medicine, 65(2), 126-134.
