There's a bowl of fruit in the staffroom. Someone's put up a shoutout wall near the printer. Wellbeing Wednesday is in the calendar. And yet teachers are still staying until six every night redoing planning because the format changed again.
This clip is taken from the Q&A section of Episode 194 of Teach Sleep Repeat, and it's Dylan's honest response to a question about why wellbeing initiatives in schools so often fall flat. His answer is direct: because most of them aren't designed to actually help anyone. They're designed to look like someone is trying.
Dylan's argument is that free fruit and appreciation walls aren't inherently bad, but when they exist alongside workload policies that haven't been reviewed in years, they stop being gestures of care and start being something else entirely. A tick box. A way of saying "we take wellbeing seriously" without having to do the difficult, structural work that would actually make a difference to how teachers feel on a Monday morning.
The real wellbeing conversation in schools isn't about snacks. It's about marking policies. Planning expectations. The number of meetings in a week. The emails sent at 10pm. Those are the things that grind people down, and no shoutout wall fixes that.
If you're a school leader, this one is worth sitting with rather than dismissing. If you're a teacher who's smiled politely at a wellbeing initiative while feeling quietly exhausted, you'll recognise everything Dylan is describing here.
Sharp, a little cathartic, and the conversation the staffroom has been having for years.
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