Stalling, rolling back, and finding first gear: a critical autoethnography of teacher wellbeing

Teacher wellbeing is increasingly recognised as critical to workforce sustainability, yet it is often framed as an individual responsibility rather than as shaped by organisational and institutional conditions. This article presents a critical autoethnographic analysis of teacher wellbeing, examining how wellbeing can be produced, constrained, and negotiated through leadership practices, workload expectations, and institutional demands in contemporary schooling contexts. Drawing on professional experiences across Australia and the United Kingdom, lived experience is used as a reflexive analytic resource to examine how teacher wellbeing is shaped through relational, organisational, and policy dynamics, including school leadership roles and practices. Informed by Job Demands–Resources Theory, social–ecological perspectives, and critical theory, the analysis identifies meaningful work and supportive leadership as key resources for teacher wellbeing. In contrast, chronic workload, performative accountability, and constrained dialogue are shown to erode wellbeing over time. Rather than positioning wellbeing as an individual attribute or resilience capacity, the findings show that wellbeing is relationally sustained yet institutionally constrained. Leadership practices can both buffer and reproduce these structural pressures. The article contributes a theoretically informed account of teacher wellbeing grounded in lived experience, with implications for leadership practice, professional learning, and system-level approaches that move beyond individualised wellbeing interventions.