The fact that we now need specialists to teach professionals how to listen to children is, itself, the evidence that something has gone seriously wrong.

Educational psychologists were not originally deployed in schools to support teacher wellbeing. Their remit was children: assessment, diagnosis, intervention, the navigation of SEND processes. That is still the formal expectation and the primary function.

But something has shifted. EPs and school mental health professionals are increasingly being called on to provide emotional coaching to teachers: helping them manage their responses to challenging pupils, supporting their emotional regulation, helping them set professional boundaries, and developing strategies for navigating the anxiety produced by inspection, management pressure, and the relentless demands of a role that has expanded far beyond its original scope.

This is worth pausing on. Not because the support is unwelcome, it is clearly needed, and the evidence on teacher wellbeing makes that plain. But because the question of why it is needed, and what its systematic provision reveals, has not been asked clearly enough. If a significant proportion of teachers require emotional coaching simply to function sustainably in their professional role, the question is not what is wrong with the teachers. The question is what the environment is doing to them.

We have already asked and answered this question for children. When children in large numbers require intervention to manage their distress, we increasingly understand that the environment is a factor in producing that distress, and that interventions applied to individuals without changing the environment will produce limited lasting benefit. The same logic applies here. The teacher who is emotionally overwhelmed, whose professional confidence has been eroded, who is managing chronic stress while being asked to emotionally regulate thirty children at once, is not primarily a coaching problem. They are an environment problem.

The schools that produce confident, engaged children reliably also produce supported, professionally respected teachers. That is not a coincidence. It is the same mechanism operating at two levels of the same system. When we change the environment for teachers, we change what is possible for children. The two are not separate questions. And any approach to school improvement that addresses one without the other is only doing half the work.