Faculty of Education News

Teachers from the University of Cambridge’s partnership schools will participate in follow-up trials of a mind management programme that evidence suggests could reduce burnout and improve wellbeing in the profession.

The trials will test the ‘Chimp Model’, an approach to self-management and personal development devised by the renowned psychiatrist, Professor Steve Peters. It proposes that our brains have an emotional and impulsive ‘Chimp’ that competes, sometimes unproductively, with our rational thinking, and that can be managed to help us to get the best out of ourselves and others.

While The Model has proven effective in other sectors, it has not been fully tested in education. The benefits could be considerable, as reported cases of poor teacher well-being and mental health are rising, contributing to a nationwide teacher retention crisis.

The forthcoming trials will build on an earlier feasibility study which was conducted in partnership with the University’s Faculty of Education and showed promising results. In the follow-up, recently qualified teachers and Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) co-ordinators will participate in a programme of eight workshops to further test The Model’s effectiveness.

They will include volunteers from the Cambridge PGCE partnership, a network of about 300 schools that help to plan, run and develop the University’s initial teacher education courses. An introductory event at the Faculty of Education, bringing together teachers, school mentors, academics and neuroscientists to discuss The Model, took place on 25 April.

Jane Warwick, PGCE Primary Programme Manager at the Faculty of Education, believes that The Chimp Model could be particularly useful for those entering the profession for the first time.

“Potentially, the idea has real mileage in initial teacher education,” she said. “For beginning teachers, there’s often a lot of emotional challenge associated with having to deal with children, parents and colleagues in a setting where unexpected things can happen. The Chimp Model provides a really useful framework for handling that, and is one of a number of tools new teachers can draw upon.”

The framework is based on Peters’ 2012 book, The Chimp Paradox, and more recently A Path through the Jungle; A Psychological Health and Wellbeing Programme to Develop Robustness and Resilience (2021), and helps individuals manage emotions, thoughts and behaviours. Founded on ideas in contemporary neuroscience, it imagines the brain as comprising three subsystems, labelled the ‘human’, ‘computer’ and ‘chimp’. The Chimp is emotional and impulsive, and can sometimes conflict with the human brain’s decision-making. By managing it we can make better decisions, communicate more clearly and can handle stress more easily.

After using some of these ideas in their own work, Warwick and a Faculty colleague approached Peters’ company, Chimp Management, in 2017 to discuss using his ideas in education and the possibility of formal research to validate this. This resulted in a feasibility study involving 184 teachers and school staff, including about 80 from the University of Cambridge’s partnership schools alongside others from the North and Midlands. The study, run by the Rotherham, Doncaster and South Humber Centre for Psychological Research (RDaSH), aimed to determine whether an eight-workshop psychoeducational intervention based on The Chimp Model, called the Skills for Life programme, could improve teachers’ well-being.

Teachers’ burnout levels and well-being were measured before, during and after the programme using two standard tools (the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory and the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale). In addition, the research used Chimp Management’s own rating scale, which asks participants to rate, on a scale of 1-10, characteristics such as self-awareness, stress management and resilience. It found that the programme significantly reduced burnout and improved the teachers’ overall well-being. The Chimp Management rating scale showed an average improvement of 23.7% over the eight-session period, which was endorsed by the more formal measures.

Participating teachers also responded very positively. One, a school leader, reflected: “I feel that I am finally getting to know and really appreciate myself as a person. I am able to deal more calmly with last-minute changes and irritating situations at school, often asking for support from colleagues – something I would not have done previously.”

Image in this story: Adulbosit Melikuziev, Unsplash.