For many education staff, the dread of September is no longer about workload alone – it is about returning to classrooms where children’s behaviour feels harder to manage, support is stretched thin, and the emotional demands of the job keep rising.
That dread is not about a lack of commitment. It is often the result of knowing exactly what is waiting on the other side of the school gates – and feeling that the challenges are getting harder, while the support is not keeping pace.
One of the biggest reasons is children’s behaviour. Across many schools, staff are dealing with rising levels of disruption, refusal, defiance, verbal aggression and emotional dysregulation. In some settings, low-level disruption has become so constant that it drains energy from every lesson. In others, more serious behaviour incidents leave staff feeling anxious before the day has even begun.
For education staff, difficult behaviour is not just an inconvenience. It affects everything. It interrupts learning, increases stress, damages morale and can leave adults feeling they are spending more time managing crisis than actually teaching or supporting children. When that becomes the daily reality, returning in September does not feel energising – it feels heavy.
Part of the problem is that behaviour rarely exists in isolation. Many children are arriving at school carrying far more emotional, social and developmental need than schools are resourced to handle alone. Staff are often expected to respond not only as educators, but as de-escalators, counsellors, social workers and emotional anchors. They do this because they care – but caring does not remove the strain.
Teaching assistants and pastoral teams often feel this especially sharply. They are frequently on the frontline of distressed, dysregulated or aggressive behaviour, yet may have the least time, status or specialist support. Many are asked to absorb intense emotional pressure while keeping classrooms stable and children safe. By the end of the year, that can take a real toll.
There is also the emotional complexity of behaviour work itself. Education staff know that children do not misbehave in a vacuum. Behaviour can reflect unmet need, instability, trauma, special educational needs, poor mental health, or a lack of boundaries elsewhere. Most staff understand that. The difficulty is that understanding the cause does not make the day-to-day experience any less exhausting. Compassion and exhaustion often sit side by side.
For some staff, the dread is also physical. Being shouted at, threatened, hit, sworn at, or constantly hyper-alert to escalation changes how a workplace feels. Even where incidents are infrequent, the possibility of them can create ongoing anxiety. No profession should treat that level of stress as normal, yet in some schools it has become quietly absorbed into the culture.
What makes this especially painful is that education staff still care deeply about children. They are not dreading the children themselves. They are dreading the combination of high need, difficult behaviour, limited capacity and insufficient support. They are dreading being asked once again to hold everything together through goodwill alone.
If schools want staff to return in September with confidence, behaviour cannot be treated as a minor discipline issue or a problem for individual classrooms to solve in isolation. Staff need clear systems, consistent leadership, realistic consequences, specialist input where needed, proper SEND support, strong pastoral structures and time to respond well rather than just react quickly.
Most of all, they need the truth to be acknowledged: managing children’s behaviour has become one of the most emotionally demanding parts of working in education. Pretending otherwise does not protect staff – it only makes them feel more alone.
Until schools and policymakers take staff stress and children’s behaviour seriously as linked issues rather than separate ones, many education professionals will continue to return each September carrying more apprehension than hope.
