The teacher wellbeing turn: neuropolitics, education and the psy-complex

Across the globe, governments are responding to a ‘teaching crisis’ marked by high attrition rates and labour shortages. This crisis can be attributed to macro changes in the economy (intensified by the shift towards high inflation, low growth economies post-COVID) and micro changes to the organisation and funding of schools with teachers experiencing stagnating wages and unmanageable workloads in punishing accountability environments. In this paper we examine how government and other authorities in England seek to manage the teaching crisis through diagnostic tools and skills training designed to measure and improving teacher wellbeing. This includes inciting new teacher subjectivities, namely neuro-liberal workers who are resilient, agile or emotionally communicative. Through combining elements of policy archaeology and genealogy, this paper specifies: i. the conditions for the emergence of teaching wellbeing as a problem; ii. the knowledge claims and alliances framing the construction of said problem; and iii. the interventions made possible by these problem framings. Critically, this paper develops a new deconstructive language to address some of the limits or overreach of scientific psychology approaches to wellbeing that are central to government approaches to framing the problem of and solutions to teaching wellbeing.