Have you ever felt you need a break after your break? A vacation after your vacation?
For many teachers, the Easter break does not begin with rest. It begins with exhaustion. In 2024, the average teacher is said to have worked about 59 hours a week- much more than an average worker! After a long term of lesson planning, marking, behaviour management, meetings, emails, and more emails… many teachers reach the holidays too drained to enjoy them.
The wider wellbeing picture is just as serious. Education Support’s Teacher Wellbeing Index 2025 found that 76% of education staff are stressed, while 77% experience symptoms of poor mental health due to work. Their summary is blunt: the well-being of the education workforce is now at crisis point.
That is why the old assumption that “teachers get loads of holiday” misses the point completely (Seriously, how is it still acceptable to say that!). Time away from school is not always the same as recovery. In fact, recovery from exhaustion is often incomplete by the time the term starts again.
Some studies put 85% of teachers working during the holidays, but what mattered even more was not just the work itself. It was the inability to switch off mentally. At Actualise Academy, we believe school breaks should not just be time off. It should be a real chance to recover, reset, and return with more energy than you left with.
That is why we created the Teacher Easter Recovery Plan. It is a small, simple resource with four practical tips to help teachers make their Easter break more rejuvenating, more realistic, more relaxing, and more genuinely restful. It is designed for real teachers with real lives, not for an ideal version of rest that only works on paper. We made the resources with teachers who have experienced this kind of burnout – firsthand!
Great teaching is not sustained by effort alone. It also needs recovery.
Most importantly, it helps to protect at least part of the holiday from school thinking. Teachers often cannot avoid every task, and that is real life. But if the whole break becomes planning, catching up, and low-level worrying, it stops doing the one thing it is supposed to do: help you recover.
For many teachers, the first step is accepting! The first few days may simply be for decompression- and that is all okay! You may sleep more, feel flat, feel emotional, or do less than you expected. That is not laziness. That is your system coming down from sustained pressure.
It also helps to build in activities that feel restorative rather than merely productive. That could be walking, getting outside in daylight, reading something unrelated to school, spending time with people who help you relax, doing something creative, or setting aside a day where school work is completely off limits. Easter is also a good time for gentle structure: enough rhythm to feel grounded, but not so much that the break starts to feel like another timetable.
Because Easter break should do more than fill time.
It should give teachers something back.
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Actualise Academy offers expertly crafted resources developed by seasoned professionals in psychology and education, designed to support your teaching success, completely free of charge!
Found this Resource useful? Check out our EPV Summer courses here.
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