Time to talk about … jumping ship

In this interview Phil Longwell talks about his research on how teachers have handled the Covid-19 pandemic, positive psychology, and why he’s jumping ship.

We’re publishing this to coincide with the final Time to Talk day, which aims to get people talking about mental health.

Thanks to Phil for agreeing to be interviewed again, and for offering up his time.

At TaWSIG we put working conditions first, so can I ask what your job situation is now and are you happy with it?

Yes, sure. I work for the local council in Adult Learning. I’m on a casual hours contract. You might call it a zero hours contract but I call it a casual hours contract, or they do anyway. I still haven’t had my contract.

Really?

I got rehired in October 2020. I chased HR and said ‘Am I going to get a contract? and they said ‘Yeah we’ll send you one’ and I haven’t had one. So I’m working, being paid, but I haven’t got a contract. That’s the first bone of contention. 

This interview also comes four years after I first ‘came out’ as someone prone to mental health problems, and the issue is that I’m fed up. I’ve had 13 years as an English language teacher. I haven’t been in regular work. Not since 2007 have I had a full-time permanent job. And I want a full-time job again. 

As you say, I last interviewed you for the 2017 Time to Talk day. In that interview you spoke about your own mental health problems. How have you been?

My mental health goes up and down. It’s not one day good, one day bad. It’s long undulations. I have months when I’m on top of the world. Coping. Organised. Everything’s fine. And then I have long periods of depression where I can’t work.

My latest bout of depression lasted about four to six weeks and ran from November through to December. Time of year, lack of work, lack of income. Lots of factors combined. But I’m quite a resilient person. I never throw in the towel. I never give up but I have periods when I’m not working and not employed.

And I think mental health and employment are interlinked. You yourself have said that you can’t separate what happens in our heads with what happens around us. And where we work, our working environments, who our employer is, what the nature of our contract is, have an impact on how we are mentally.

So regarding your research. First of all, can you explain what you set out to do?

It was a follow-up to research I carried out in December 2017, but with a Covid-19 focus. I made the assumption that everyone taking part had experienced some kind of lockdown, and it was filled in by about 170 people from around the world from nearly 50 different countries. I didn’t get as many replies as with my previous research, but I didn’t need to because it was qualitative. There were only a couple of questions that were statistical, the rest were open ended.  You write what you want to write. I didn’t use any research analysis software. I just went through and picked out representative quotes. It was reacting to the answers respondents gave to me, and hopefully reporting and sharing a balanced view of opinion.

Let’s talk about some of the responses. Can you tell us what kinds of mental distress people have experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic?

I think anxiety increased a lot among language teachers in general. I think depression was possibly in there too – being forced to work from home was a shock to the system for many teachers.

People’s mental health was bound to be impacted by Covid-19 and all that came with it. Not only that, but turn on the daily news and it’s depressing story after depressing story. There wasn’t a lot in 2020 to be happy about, was there?

Did many people report that they felt isolated?

Yes. They felt isolated. Lack of social contact was a big issue. Just the social side, socialising in a pub. The things you weren’t allowed to do. First of all in the first lockdown, partly in the second lockdown, and again with this equally serious third lockdown.

In response to the question ‘What does your employer, if you have one, do to support your mental wellbeing?’ many of your respondents wrote about working conditions and precarity. Can you tell us a little of what they said?

They were talking about not having a guarantee of work, already being in insecure employment already and furthermore, if they were working for a language school they didn’t know if that language school was going to survive. In 2020 some language schools did die. The financial impact on language schools, universities, and other institutions was massive.

I had another question which was ‘What would a second lockdown do for you?’ When I did the research, most people had already had one period of lockdown but a second one was on the cards.  And most people said ‘Well I don’t think I’ll cope financially. I think that’ll be it.’

You also asked about family (‘Do you have family in another country to where you are working? If so, how does this affect your mental wellbeing?’) and this topic seemed to hit a chord. Can you explain some of the responses?

P: I think that TEFLers, people that go to other countries and teach English as a foreign language, they have this issue anyway. They miss home. They get homesick. They feel isolated. They don’t always get on in another country. I mean many do, many thrive – but having family in another country to where you are working always has potential mental health side effects. And I think what happened last year impacted people tremendously because suddenly you weren’t able to just go home. You weren’t able to travel. Plane travel stopped for a while. People were not allowed to go between countries. There were outright bans on people travelling.

And it does impact people’s mental health. A lot of people found it nerve-wracking and stressful. And people wrote at length. They wrote long replies to this question because people really wanted to express how it had affected them personally. How difficult it was. People’s feelings about being separated from friends and family worsened because of Covid-19. Not so much from the TEFL teacher, not so much from the person who’d done the travelling – but how it felt for their families.

Almost everybody wrote about how difficult it became throughout 2020 and still is for many people, if they haven’t already given up their jobs and flown home. Yes we had Zoom. Yes we had Skype. Yes you can still ring people. But not physically being with people causes distress. 

Do you think it’s the sudden lack of agency that is the problem?

I don’t know. Again, with mental health problems they often aren’t diagnosed. What happens is you start to feel symptoms of poor mental health even if it’s just loneliness – which is not in itself a mental health condition but a human condition. We didn’t have the word ‘self-isolation’ or ‘furlough’ in our everyday language last year. People were having to understand how a pandemic works. So I think it’s had a huge impact on people trying to do their teaching jobs.

You also asked people about teaching online. How have teachers found teaching online during the pandemic? 

Again, there was a range of views. A lot of people took to it very easily, the people that are tech-savvy. But teachers that got into the profession because they like the physical contact and speaking with learners and creating rapport in the classroom, they missed that. There was also a kind of halfway house where people said ‘Ok I’ve adapted but it’s not ideal … I can do it … I’ve still got a job.’

And then you had the hybrid issues. This became more common as the new academic year started, because there was the question of how to accommodate people who can be present and those who can’t. Having a teacher suddenly faced with the added pressure of having to teach students who are in the classroom but physically distanced and also students accessing the class remotely. Yes it can be done, yes there is the tech, but teachers are stressed enough already.

In your blog post you mention positive psychology, and you note some of the criticisms that have been directed at it, such as those in Philip Kerr’s blog post. How would you defend positive psychology?

First of all I would defend positive psychology and the work of Martin Seligman and the PERMA+ model. I’ve been to conferences where this has been spoken about with great enthusiasm. There’s a lot to be said for it. Yes external factors, structural issues, systemic issues, are very important – but there’s also a lot of misunderstanding of positive psychology. 

However, it does tend, from what I know, to ignore systemic issues. It tends to be about the individual can do. Now there’s nothing wrong in an individual taking positive steps to improve their own wellbeing, whether that’s mindfulness or Qi Gong classes. Yes you’ve been dismissive about ‘growth mindsets’. Why are we focusing on the individual improving their mindsets when there are structural or systemic issues or issues with working conditions? Well, both are important. You have to have both. You can’t ignore one or the other. It can’t all be about structural issues, it can’t all be about working conditions.

I included your quote I was presenting at the EAQUALS conference. At the time you tweeted two questions for EAQUALS online [see above]. Now what goes on in my head is: ‘Oh here’s Paul again chucking in bricks from the outside’. You should really be at the conference to know what’s being said. However, I’ve always sympathised with some of the things you’ve said, but not the way you do it.

To finish off on positive psychology, I’m not a huge proponent and I think Seligman has a lot to say about how we can be happy, but we can’t ignore other factors.

To go back to your research. Financial security is another issue that came up. One person wrote about how ELT is a vulnerable industry and teachers are deciding to jump ship. Do you think many teachers will decide to leave ELT as we come out of the pandemic?

I think because the pandemic has affected the industry so much, a lot of teachers are fed up because they don’t see enough security in ELT. And there never really has been much security in ELT. You can forge a career for yourself if you’re resilient enough but a lot of teachers find that after 10 or 12 years, it’s time to jump ship.

And that’s what I’m doing. I’m jumping ship because I’ve had enough. I’ve just done it long enough. And the main reason I’m jumping ship is financial. If I’m being honest, I want to get a place with my girlfriend this year. And I can only do that if I have a full-time permanent secure job. I can’t do it with casual hours from my current employer. I just can’t. So yes it is a vulnerable industry, it always has been a dodgy one in terms of employment. Everyone has their breaking point and I think with Covid-19 restrictions and what’s happened with the pandemic over the last 12 months people have found their breaking point and are looking to jump ship.

Is there anything else you’d like to say about your research?

I’m very proud of what I’ve written and I’m very proud of how I’ve presented the research. When I first did it I thought there’s not going to be a huge amount here, and there weren’t that many responses. But when I dug deep, and when you do dig deep, and people are able to speak freely and anonymously, people do – like in a counselling or therapy session – they really do open up. And I think that’s what they did, and that’s all I’d like to say. Thank you.

Further Reading

Time to Talk Day 2021 – ‘The Power of Small’

Martin Sketchley – ‘This is Why You Shouldn’t Work For iTutorGroup‘

TEFL Workers’ Union – ‘TEFL Workers’ Union takes Kaplan to employment tribunal, alleging bogus fixed-term contracts‘

TEFL Workers’ Union Facebook page