Researchers at UCL’s Institute of Education have used Understanding Society data to show that, although teaching is a stressful job, it is not bad for people’s physical health. The research was the first to compare the health of teachers and non-teachers using biomarkers.
The researchers – Sam Sims, John Jerrim, Hannah Taylor and Rebecca Allen, at UCL’s Institute of Education – said in their paper: “Teaching is a demanding job and research suggests that prolonged exposure to stress can affect physical health.” Previous studies have found that teachers report relatively poor physical health, but until now, there was no research comparing teachers to other occupations using objective health measures.
They set out to change this, using a dataset from the UK Biobank and our biomarker data. In Waves 2 and 3 of Understanding Society, around 20,000 participants had a health assessment with a nurse, and over 13,000 gave a blood sample. This produced 12 objective measures of health, such as cholesterol, hormones related to stress and ageing, and signs of inflammation in the body due to injury, infection or stress. These allowed us to create an index of allostatic load – a ‘score’ from 0 to 12 for each respondent, showing whether they were at higher or lower risk of ill health.
The research found “no statistically significant overall association between teaching and health”, and their findings were consistent across the two datasets, using a representative sample of teachers, and taking their parents’ medical history into account.
In principle, the lack of association between teaching and poor health could be due to the fact that education is known to have a positive effect on health, and teaching is overwhelmingly a graduate profession. However, the research took graduate status into account – and compared teachers with other graduate professions.
The researchers also suggest that other aspects of the job might counteract the stress of teaching. It is, for example, less sedentary than many office-based graduate jobs, and there is a link between sedentary lifestyles and long-term health. Teachers also tend not to smoke, partly because schools in England have to be smoke free, and this will also have health benefits.
“Either way,” they say, “it appears that teaching is not an unhealthy career choice.”
Read the research in Oxford Review of Education
Find out more about our collection of health-related data, including blood pressure, weight, height, waist measurement, body fat, grip strength, lung function and blood samples from 20,000 participants
Biomarkers, genetics and epigeneticsEducationHealth and wellbeing
