There is no single, universally accepted definition of resilience (Naglieri & LeBuffe, 2005). Rather than being a fixed personal trait, resilience is best understood as a dynamic process. It refers to how individuals adapt positively and are supported to thrive when faced with significant challenges or adversity (Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000).

Resilience is therefore about the process of overcoming challenge. Given the many challenges within the teaching profession, resilience provides a useful framework for exploring how teachers can be supported to thrive. From this perspective, resilience emerges through the interaction between risk factors and protective factors, which may operate at multiple ecological levels. By ecological level, we mean different layers of the social systems that teachers are part of.  In other words, teacher resilience is not just influenced by factors at the individual level, as factors in the school environment and broader education system are also likely to be important (Benard, 2004; Ungar, 2011).

Importantly, many researchers propose resilience is not directly measurable. Instead, they look for evidence of positive adaptation despite challenging circumstances. Positive adaptation is an umbrella term used to describe beneficial outcomes that individuals experience even when facing significant risks within their environment (Howard & Johnson, 2004; Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000; Masten, Best, & Garmezy, 1990; Naglieri & LeBuffe, 2005). Positive adaptation may be reflected in higher levels of wellbeing and job satisfaction, alongside lower levels of burnout.

These outcomes are widely recognised as key indicators of teacher resilience (Bobek, 2002; Ghanizadeh & Jahedizadeh, 2015; Howard & Johnson, 2004; Mansfield et al., 2016). Together, they provide insight into whether teachers are thriving, surviving, or at risk of leaving the profession (Beltman, Mansfield, & Price, 2011).

Understanding resilience in this way highlights that supporting teacher resilience is not solely about individual coping strategies. It requires identifying and strengthening protective factors across multiple levels of the education system.

A social-ecological approach recognises that resilience does not sit solely within the individual. While some protective factors are personal, many others operate across wider social, organisational, and policy contexts (Ungar, 2015). This perspective helps to avoid the over-individualisation of resilience, where responsibility is placed entirely on teachers to cope with challenging conditions.

For teachers, the protective factors that support resilience can be found across multiple ecological levels. These include individual factors such as self-efficacy, emotional intelligence, and optimism; school-level factors such as leadership support and school culture; and wider system-level factors such as inspection frameworks, and education policies.

Within this social-ecological framing, resilience is understood as a dynamic process rather than a fixed quality or trait (Gu, 2018). Because resilience emerges from the interaction of multiple factors across the system, it cannot be measured directly. Instead, researchers examine both the factors that influence the resilience process and the outcomes that indicate how well that process is operating, i.e. wellbeing, job satisfaction and burnout.

A social-ecological approach addresses critiques of resilience by emphasising shared responsibility. When teachers’ working contexts are taken seriously, resilience is no longer about asking individuals to “be more resilient”. Instead, responsibility is distributed across the whole system, creating opportunities for change at individual, school, and policy levels (Johnson & Down, 2013; Ungar, 2011). From this perspective, resilience is understood as a process of adaptation shaped by multiple, interacting influences over time, rather than a personal attribute that teachers either have or do not have (Beltman, 2015; Gu, 2018; Ungar et al., 2013).

Ecology mapping is a research method used to explore how individuals interact with the social and environmental systems around them. In our research, we adapted this approach to explore how teachers experience their social-ecological contexts and how these interactions influence the resilience process. Rather than focusing only on what teacher resilience is, ecology mapping allowed us to explore where change might be possible across the system to better support teacher resilience.

Our approach involved four key phases: first, ecology mapping interviews in which teachers explored aspects of their social-ecological system that they perceived to influence their resilience; second, action planning based on the themes emerging from these discussions; third, an intervention phase in which schools trialled strategies to promote teacher resilience; and finally, post-intervention interviews in which participants reflected on any perceived impacts of the strategies implemented.

The ecology mapping interviews took place across eight schools: four primary, one junior and three secondary schools. In total, 102 teachers participated in small-group discussions. During the interviews, teachers were provided with cards labelled with factors that our previous survey study had identified as important for teacher resilience, including both individual-level factors (such as self-esteem) and school-level factors (such as workload). Teachers were also given the opportunity to add additional factors and to show connections between them.

The mapping process primarily acted as a structured way to support dialogue. The cards were used to prompt discussion about teachers’ experiences of resilience, the challenges they faced, and their ideas about how resilience could be better supported within their school contexts. In this way, ecology mapping helped generate rich, understandings about how teacher resilience unfolds as well as supporting schools to identify intervention strategies to support teacher resilience further. Insights from this process have been embedded throughout the toolkit.

We conducted a large survey to explore the factors that support teacher resilience. A total of 2,943 teachers working in England took part, from primary, secondary, and other school types.

The survey measured a wide range of potential predictors of resilience, including individual-level factors such as self-esteem, emotional intelligence, optimism, self-care, and self-efficacy. It also included contextual factors such as workload, leadership support, school culture, pupil behaviour, and support from colleagues. The key outcomes were teacher wellbeing, job satisfaction, and burnout, each reflecting a different aspect of positive adaptation.

The survey was distributed online to teachers with some help from our project partners the National Education Union, and Education Support. Participation was voluntary and anonymous, and the study was conducted in line with UK ethical guidelines.

Our findings revealed distinct patterns across the three outcomes. For wellbeing, individual factors were found to be particularly important. Five of the six strongest predictors were individual-level factors, including self-esteem, self-care, optimism, emotional intelligence, and emotional stability, with workload being the only major contextual factor among the top predictors.

These results suggest that different aspects of teacher resilience have distinct predictor profiles. Wellbeing was primarily associated with individual-level factors, while burnout and job satisfaction are mainly associated with contextual and systemic factors. The findings suggest that one-size-fits-all interventions are unlikely to be effective. Interventions which target individual factors might be more relevant for wellbeing, whereas reducing burnout and improving job satisfaction requires systemic and contextual change. These findings have directly informed the toolkit, helping to highlight the factors that might be most important for supporting teacher resilience.