And what is more, it is a critical and largely unrecognised factor driving their exit from the profession.
The ground-breaking study, undertaken by human performance researcher Dr Adam Fraser and a team from Deakin University, has uncovered alarming evidence that STS, largely overlooked until now in education, is a critical threat to teacher mental health, wellbeing and retention.
STS is different from burnout, it stems from indirect exposure to trauma, Fraser explains.
When combined with burnout, it leads to what is called ‘compassion fatigue’, a debilitating condition that strips educators of their capacity to have empathy for others.
It puts them in a state of emotional disconnection where they find it difficult to recognise signs of abuse or distress in others.
“This issue has crept in unnoticed,” Fraser says.
“When we started this research, no one in education was talking about STS – it was all about burnout and general wellbeing.
“The toll of exposure to student trauma, combined with increased expectations and limited support, is pushing educators to breaking point.”
In the nationwide study involving 2285 educators and 1068 stories of trauma, educators reported STS levels 21 per cent higher than psychologists, 23 per cent higher than mental health nurses and 34 per cent higher than paramedics.
However, despite the broad nature and intensity of this impact, unlike their health and emergency service counterparts, most educators receive no formal support or training to manage STS.
“These people are experiencing this far more than these kind of traditional roles that we think ‘well of course they would feel that’,” Fraser tells EducationHQ.
“A really important thing is that it’s not just teachers [who are affected by STS], they usually turn to their leaders for support and it affects them dramatically, too,” Dr Adam Fraser says.
“What’s really concerning is these other professions, undergraduates are taught about STS – they have legislation and rules in their workplace where, if they're exposed to this they have to take some time out or take some leave.
“For teachers, the instances are actually worse than all these other groups, they are witnessing the impact of student trauma, day after day, with no buffer, no outlet, and they don't get anything like this support.”
Fraser and the Deakin University research team, led by wellbeing expert Dr John Molineux, had four very clear objectives when they launched the first study of its kind to look at the impact and management of secondary trauma in educators.
“One was to work out is this actually a problem or is it just something that affects a few people? Is this something we actually need to worry about?
“And what we found is that 75 per cent of educators said that they're in the medium to high exposure of secondary trauma,” Fraser explains.
Secondly, the team wanted to undertake a demographic analysis to work out who's affected the most.
“Is it new teachers? Is it people coming towards the end of their career, is it rural, remote? So we wanted to just understand the demographics of it.
“The third one was what are people currently doing to address it? And the last was what strategies are actually effective?”
The research found that 70.8 per cent of educators scored in the medium to high range for burnout; with 61.4 per cent answering ‘often’ or ‘very often’ to the statement “I feel overwhelmed because my workload seems endless”.
“We said to them because of this type of stress how likely are you to leave the role and almost 40 percent of people said 'I'm likely or extremely likely to leave.
”So it is a key driver of teacher shortage.”
The report found that STS is higher for rural and remote schools over regional and metro schools and more prevalent in educators with 16 years or more of experience.
“Higher rates in rural and remote instances are usually because the services there are far fewer,” Fraser says.
“So, the educators are having to step in more.
“The fact that people longer in their career score higher, and this might be a frightening finding, is that it kind of indicates that this STS accumulates over your career and it almost builds up in your system.”
Encouragingly, researchers identified a group they called ‘the Diamonds’, people who had very high exposure to secondary trauma, but their secondary trauma stress was actually quite low.
“So, we looked at these people and asked what are they doing?” Fraser poses.
The common characteristic was they use multiple strategies to manage their STS, ranging from having a hobby that distracts them when they go home, they physically look after themselves with their eating, they exercise, and they have good sleep hygiene.
They also really perpetuate a good culture at school, Fraser shares.
“And some of the schools said, ‘what really helps is at the end of the day, we have a little huddle, we talk about the day, what has happened, how do we feel, what progress have we made?’
“And some people take time for reflective practice – they literally write down, ‘I found this very hard today, it made me feel this, here's what I'm thinking about doing tomorrow’.”
Fraser says the research suggested supervisor support is the most important relationship.
“Like if you turn to your supervisor and they're very supportive and you have a good relationship, that significantly helps you deal with STS.”
The report warns, however, that STS is not a problem educators can fix on their own.
It calls for urgent system-level intervention from governments and education departments.
Fraser says a critical first step is for governments, education departments and school leaders to acknowledge and recognise that this is a problem and that this thing actually exists.
“We tried to engage with some systems and departments and they weren't keen on having this conversation,” Fraser says.
“It requires every level to take this seriously and start to implement change,” Fraser says.
Actions suggested by the report include formal recognition of STS as a professional risk for educators and the introduction of STS as an area in all undergraduate teaching degrees
The report also calls for the provision of highly effective evidence based self-care training to mitigate STS and Burnout, provision of trauma informed practice training at a school level for better student outcomes and Increased funding and resourcing to child and health care services and systems – mental heath care services, department of child services to meet the levels of mandatory reporting.
To read the final report: The Silent Cost: Impact and Management of Secondary Trauma in Educators, click here.
