To highlight effective levers to promote teachers’ wellbeing worldwide, particularly during difficult times such as the COVID-19 pandemic, we investigated work-related factors associated with teacher wellbeing, across borders and cultures. In six countries/territories, we examined the factors that were most consistently and strongly associated with two indicators of wellbeing at work: (i) job satisfaction; and (ii) work/life balance, and three indicators of general wellbeing: (i) subjective health; (ii) mental health; and (iii) life satisfaction. Between May and July 2021, after 18 months of the pandemic, 8000 teachers answered the first edition of the International Barometer of Education Personnel’s Health and Wellbeing (I-BEST): 3646 teachers from France, 2349 from Québec, 1268 from Belgium, 302 from Morocco, 222 from The Gambia, and 215 from Mexico. For each country/territory and each wellbeing indicator, we used a forward stepwise regression procedure to identify important determinants among a carefully selected set of 31 sociodemographic, private, and professional life factors. Aside from healthcare access, the factors most consistently and strongly associated with teacher wellbeing in France, Québec and Belgium (samples whose size were ≥1000) were related to the psychosocial and the organizational dimensions of work, namely: feeling of safety at school, autonomy at work, and the quality of relationships with superiors and quality of relationships with students. In the smaller samples of teachers from the three remaining countries (Morocco, The Gambia and Mexico), exploratory analyses showed that the feeling of safety and autonomy at work were, there too, consistently associated with wellbeing indicators. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the factors most consistently associated with teachers’ wellbeing across countries were related to security and autonomy at work, supporting the importance to consider these aspects in a continuous, structural way at school. Factors associated with teachers’ wellbeing in very different contexts require further cross-cultural study.

Teachers’ health is a key factor of any successful education system, but available data are conflicting. To evaluate to what extent teachers’ health could be at risk, we used pre-pandemic data from the CONSTANCES population-based French cohort (inclusion phase: 2012–2019) and compared teachers (n = 12,839) included in the cohort with a random subsample selected among all other employees (n = 32,837) on four self-reported health indicators: perceived general health, depressive symptoms (CES-D scale), functional limitations in the last six months, and persistent neck/back troubles (Nordic questionnaire). We further restricted our comparison group to the State employees (n = 3583), who share more occupational similarities with teachers. Lastly, we focused on teachers and evaluated how their health status might differ across teaching levels (primary, secondary, and higher education). As compared to non-teacher employees, and even after adjusting for important demographic, socioeconomic, lifestyle, and occupational confounders, teachers were less likely to report bad perceived health and depressive symptoms but were more likely to present functional limitations. Trends were similar in the analyses restricted to State employees. Within the teaching population, secondary school teachers were more likely to report depressive symptoms but less frequently declared persistent neck/back troubles than primary school teachers. Our descriptive cross-sectional study based on a probability sampling procedure (secondary use of CONSTANCES inclusion data) did not support the idea that teachers’ health in France was particularly at risk in the pre-pandemic period. Both cross-cultural and longitudinal studies are needed to further gain information on the topic of teachers’ health around the world and to monitor its evolution over time, particularly during crises impacting the education system such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: Education professionals have a role to play in health education, both as knowledge providers and role-models. To appraise their health awareness, we compared their health behaviours to those of non-education employees. Methods: Using inclusion data of the CONSTANCES French cohort (2012-2019) and adjusting for important confounders (sex, age, education,...), we alternately compared three indicators of risky conducts (at-risk drinking, current smoking, past year-cannabis use) and two indicators of unhealthy lifestyle (low physical activity, overweight/obesity) between education professionals (n = 14730) and a random sample of non-education employees (n = 34244). Among education professionals, we distinguished between teachers (n = 12820), school principals (n = 372), principal educational advisers (n = 189), school health professionals (n = 128), and school manual/service staff (n = 1221). Results: Teachers were less likely than non-education employees to be at-risk drinker, to smoke, to have used cannabis in the past year and to be overweight/obese. Other non-teaching education professionals were also rather less involved in risky conducts than non-education employees. Nonetheless, school principals and principal educational advisers reported more often low physical activity and school principals and manual/service staff were more prone to overweight/obesity than non-education employees. Conclusions: In this large nationwide sample of French employees, education professionals were rather less involved in risky conducts than other non-education employees with a similar demographic and socioeconomic profile. Yet, non-teaching education professionals showed punctually unhealthy lifestyle indicators, suggesting a window of opportunity to improve both their own health and, indirectly through role-model, that of the youth with whom they interact daily. Key messages: Education professionals, especially teachers, appear more health-conscious than average. There may still be room for improvement toward a healthier lifestyle. In addition, the average observed may be quite far from the recommended public health target, so that any action to enhance education professional’s health behaviours will have societal benefits.

Objectives: Teachers’ mental health, an important asset for society, may be impacted by security or health crises alongside more structural changes. Our primary aim was to assess 2012–2022 trends in depressive symptoms among French teachers compared to similar employees. We further examined concomitant trends in job dissatisfaction. Methods: Within the ongoing French national CONSTANCES cohort, depressive symptoms were regularly assessed (up to four times between 2012 and 2022) using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression scale (CES-D, score 0–60). We used mixed models adjusted for sociodemographic factors to estimate mean parameters (95% CI) of CES-D variations between 2012 and 2022 among teachers (n=15 022) compared with other intermediate or managerial/professional occupations (n=21 361). We similarly studied changes in job dissatisfaction (score 1–8) from 2018 (first occurrence in questionnaires) to 2022. Results: In 2012, teachers’ CES-D was slightly lower on average compared with that of non-teachers (−0.66 point (−1.19 to −0.12)), but tended to increase more rapidly over the decade, particularly in the years concomitant to the COVID-19 pandemic (+0.14 point/year (0.01 to 0.27)). By 2022, the gap had closed. Job dissatisfaction followed a somewhat different pattern: slightly lower among teachers in 2018, it increased at first more rapidly compared with non-teachers, but then stabilised, in parallel with the waning of the pandemic. Conclusions: Our study highlights unfavourable long-term trends in the mental well-being of French teachers. Although clinical changes at individual levels would be mostly imperceptible, our findings concern a large population of key professionals, suggesting their growing needs for mental health support in the long run.