Draw the line: permission to switch off

I’ve been battling, continuously on and off, with the guilt of not working over summer. And on a number of occasions, I’ve conceded.
Sometimes through my own choice: opening the laptop, checking something… tackling one of those jobs from the ever-present to-do list because I know it will need doing eventually, so why not just get it done now?

On other occasions, the choice hasn’t really been mine:

Meetings have been booked in, capital projects being managed, things have cropped up and, inevitably within school leadership, last-minute safeguarding issues have needed attention.
Of course, some things can’t wait. That’s leadership. That’s schools. That’s life.
But that’s not really the guilt I’m talking about…It’s the other stuff.

That nagging feeling that there is something I could be doing.
Anyone working in education will probably recognise it: you can be sat with your family, away for the day, walking the dog, reading a book, sitting in the garden or doing absolutely nothing, and then that thought appears…I could just get that done. And there it is. The to-do list has managed to follow you home, on holiday, into the garden, or wherever you’ve attempted to escape to.
I’ve noticed that, at times this summer, that feeling has consumed some of my will for freedom:

• Freedom to spend uninterrupted time with my family.
• Freedom to do something simply because I enjoy doing it.
• Freedom to do nothing at all.

I had to have a fairly stern word with myself because upon reflection, I know how hard my team have worked this year. I’ve watched it.

I’ve seen the hours they’ve given, the emotional energy they’ve invested, the difficult conversations they’ve had and the countless small acts they’ve undertaken for children and families that will never appear on a timetable, performance-management document or job description. I’ve told them they deserve their summer and I’ve wanted them to protect it.

So surely, at some point, I have to take note of some of my own advice and enact it myself?

If I genuinely believe the people I lead have earned the right to step away without guilt, why would I hold myself to a different standard?

And perhaps you need to ask yourself the same question.

We Already Give A  Lot

It’s worth reminding ourselves just how much teachers and leaders actually give.

The Department for Education’s most recent Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders survey reported that in 2025 full-time teachers worked an average of 50.1 hours in a term-time week, while full-time leaders averaged 56.5 hours.

Those figures have fallen slightly compared with previous years, which is welcoming, but there still remains extraordinary amounts of professional time, and these hours only tell part of the story.

Teachers don’t take the job thinking solely about promotions, personal achievements or a job that balances well with their other hobbies and interests. They don’t go about their week thinking if I work another two hours tonight, perhaps I’ll get promoted, but rather, if I spend a bit longer on this, perhaps it will be better for the children.

There’s an important difference.

Teachers and leaders spend countless hours, in and out of the classroom, thinking about the child who hasn’t quite understood, or the family who needs another phone call, or how the lesson could be better, or the display that isn’t finished, or the colleague who might need checking in on.

Because every one of those things matters and can become a perfectly reasonable justification for doing just a little bit more.

That’s one of the dangerously beautiful things about our profession. When your motivation is rooted in doing your best for children, where exactly do you draw the line?

Draw the line

I’m certainly not going to tell anybody reading this that they shouldn’t do any work during the summer; that would be somewhat hypocritical!

And actually, for some of us, doing a little bit might genuinely help and take the edge off. If spending a morning sorting your classroom, organising September or getting that annoying job out of your head allows you to relax afterwards, then do it.

But draw a line.

There is a threshold where preparation stops making September easier and begins taking something away from the person, your future self, who actually has to live through September.

That threshold will be different for everyone and so it is an important thing to recognise that it exists.

Our work will never be completely finished.

There is always another lesson that could be improved; another policy to be reviewed or written; another document that could be read; another idea that could be explored. Time doesn’t filter your workload; sometimes you’ll have a quiet spell and then all of a sudden, they’ll all come at once. But the thing is, you always find a way to cope, to get by, to do your best.

So if your permission to relax depends upon reaching the bottom of your to-do list, we all will be waiting for a very long time.

Perhaps We Need To Trust (or make new) Our Habits

This got me thinking about James Clear’s Atomic Habits.

The book describes habits as the “compound interest of self-improvement”. Small actions can seem insignificant when considered individually, but repeated consistently their effects accumulate. Ultimately, you are greater than the sum of your parts (Aristotle).

As he puts it rather neatly: “You get what you repeat.”

His well-known idea of becoming 1% better isn’t about finding one transformative intervention. It’s about recognising the cumulative power of tiny improvements over time.

And surely teachers and leaders are living examples of this?

Think about the thousands upon thousands of tiny professional decisions you’ve made: the question you rephrased; the child you noticed wasn’t themselves; the explanation you changed halfway through because thirty faces told you it hadn’t landed; supporting your organisation during a heatwave; the encouragement quietly offered to someone who desperately needed it.

None of those individual moments made you an expert teacher and leader. But, collectively? Repeated day after day, week after week, year after year, they become your craft, they become your habits. Eventually, those habits become part of who you are professionally.

You Are What You Repeatedly Do

Of course, James Clear wasn’t the first person to recognise this. More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle was writing about the relationship between repeated action and character.

There’s a famous quotation regularly attributed to him:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

It’s a poignant line.

His analogy is wonderfully simple: builders become builders by building and musicians become musicians by playing.

Put simply, we learn by doing them.

Think about what that means for teaching. You became a teacher by teaching. Not by preparing to teach forever. You became better by doing it, reflecting on it, getting things wrong, adjusting, trying again and accumulating thousands of hours of experience.

Which raises an important question…

• Why are we so frightened that a few weeks away will somehow undo it?

Trust The Elephant

Jonathan Haidt offers another useful way of thinking about this in The Happiness Hypothesis.

He describes our conscious, rational mind as a rider sitting on an elephant. The rider can reason, plan and make decisions… but the elephant represents the much larger collection of intuitions, automatic reactions, emotions and learnt behaviours underneath.

The rider might decide what it wants but you can’t simply command the inner elephant to immediately behave differently; it has to be trained over time. And that is exactly what years of teaching have done: you have trained your elephant.

You’ve developed automatic/ habitual ways of noticing; responding; questioning; adapting; explaining; reading a room; managing thirty competing demands while somehow remembering that one child needed to speak to you at break.

Much of this no longer requires the same conscious effort it once did.

Haidt’s metaphor helps explain why sustained practice matters: our repeated experiences gradually shape the automatic part of ourselves that carries so much of our behaviour.

And that means something quite reassuring at the end of August.

Your elephant hasn’t forgotten.

You don’t suddenly cease being a good teacher because you’ve spent two weeks away from your laptop. Your instincts haven’t evaporated because you’ve ignored your emails. Your experience isn’t draining away while you’re sitting on a beach.

Those habits will still be there when the classroom door opens again. Perhaps we should trust them a little more.

High Performance Isn’t One Heroic Effort

I’ve also been thinking about Jake Humphrey’s and Damian Hughes’ High Performance. The premise of the book is captured in four words: “High performance isn’t born. It’s made.”

Again, it’s the habits that matter.

Humphrey and Hughes explore what they call “Trademark Behaviours”: simple, consistent behaviours that high performers and high-performing cultures return to repeatedly: not one heroic performance; not one spectacular week. Consistency.

That feels remarkably applicable to schools because good teachers aren’t good because of one heroic Sunday spent planning.

Good leaders aren’t good because they answer emails at 11pm.

Good schools aren’t good because everyone exhausts themselves during the final week of August.

They are good because certain behaviours happen consistently:

• Children are noticed.
• Expectations are upheld.
• Lessons are thought about carefully.
• People support one another.
• Problems are addressed.
• Relationships are built.
• People reflect and improve, day after day.

If our professional competence has been created through years of those repeated behaviours, then perhaps genuine expertise should eventually earn us something.

Trust.

Trust that we can stop.

Trust that we can step away.

Trust that when we return, we will still know what to do.

Marginal Gain Can Happen From Nothing

Maybe sometimes the marginal gain is about stopping.

Which brings me back to James Clear and those tiny, repeated improvements. Perhaps we sometimes misunderstand marginal gains and we look for another thing to add.

• Another strategy.
• Another resource.
• Another 1%.

But sometimes the improvement might come from subtraction: closing the laptop when you’d ordinarily keep going; not checking the email; going home; protecting Saturday; taking the walk; saying, that can wait; spending uninterrupted time with people you love.

Perhaps self-care becomes meaningful in exactly the same way expertise does, not through one grand gesture, but through repeated small behaviours. As Seneca’s analogy compares the mind to fertile farmland: continually forcing production eventually exhausts it, whereas periods of rest restore its powers.

Final Thought – Before We Go Back

So this is as much a note to myself as it is to anyone else. Do what you need to do.

Prepare what will genuinely make September easier; for example, if an hour at school will settle your mind, take the hour; If writing the list stops it spinning around your head, write the list.

But then draw the line.

Not when everything is finished. It won’t be. Draw it when you’ve done enough.

And once you have crossed onto the other side of that line, try not to spend your rest feeling guilty about resting. You have spent years accumulating the habits, knowledge, instincts, mistakes, reflection and experience that make you the teacher or leader you are.

So have a little faith in the professional you’ve already become.

Your habits aren’t going anywhere.

And when the time comes, you will step back across that threshold and begin again.

Until then?

Give yourself permission to be somewhere else.