TEACHERS have spoken about the impact of the pandemic on their mental health and how parents’ demands are encroaching on their time, feeling they should have access to them 24 hours a day.

At the NASUWT teaching union’s annual conference in Birmingham on Sunday, member Sharon Bishop, who works in Wolverhampton, said many teachers have been told to download educational app ClassDojo, which links parents and pupils with teachers.

She said: “Parents and students have got into the habit of firing off emails 24-7, with the banal, bizarre, and sometimes, more worryingly, aggressive and accusatory messages.

“They seem to feel they can assess us 24-7. Working hours and parameters have been blurred since the pandemic.”

Kat Lord Watson, who worked at a private school in Scotland during the pandemic, said: “The knowledge that the parents were watching you and reading you on their WhatsApp groups was also quite incredible.”

The conference voted for every school to incorporate welfare into their curriculum, for NASUWT to lobby the government to include mental health first-aid training as a compulsory part of teacher training and for any education recovery strategy to have teacher and pupil mental health at its core.