Hi Catherine, thanks for your reply. I agree with what you say about identifying what is not working systemically. I discussed this with my counsellor (the Education Support Service are outstanding and free to all in education) and we decided before Christmas to put a proposal in to the Head (I’d already sent her an email bullet pointing the problems and what is not working).
Today, I finalised the proposal and sent it to my regional union rep (who also is brilliant) for his thoughts as to whether my proposals were reasonable.
What I meant by ‘blame’ (I didn’t put it very well in my post) is that it’s all to easy and quite common for some senior leaders to say that “he is not coping”, “he needs a break and then he’ll be fine” etc when actually, as you say, the system isn’t working as they’ve been piling on the workload for some time and despite me flagging this up, it has been ignored (I have even been told “welcome to my world” and “do you think medication from your GP will help?” !!)
I just hope I can get back to work this week, but unless there are changes, I would just be walking into the same scenario and potentially be off work again in a few months.