A 33-year-old maths teacher, Charlotte Webborn, gave up the role she had held for eight years after realising she had ‘nothing left’ for her own children
A long commute and endless marking on top of the school day left the former math’s teacher completely “burnt out” – as the pupils’ behaviour got steadily worse.
Charlotte Webborn, 33, from Swansea spent eight years working as a maths teacher, but the combination of exhausting factors means she has said goodbye to the classroom – for good. “You’re giving everything to other people’s children and then you’ve got nothing left for your own,” she explains.
“I was leaving the house at 7am, and sometimes I wouldn’t even see them in the morning,” she says about her own two kids, whose names she wants to keep private. You miss the small things like breakfast together or school drop offs. It was all rushed, or left to my husband, Sam.”
READ MORE: ‘I thought it was nothing’ – man’s brief headaches turned out to be a tumourREAD MORE: ‘I was stuck on the ‘Covid Cruise’, I was treated like a leper’
She also claims that the job itself had changed significantly in recent years, with her focus being pulled onto containing rowdy behaviour of her pupils, rather than actually doing any teaching. “Behaviour has definitely got worse since Covid, there was just constant low level disruption.
“This had a knock-on effect on teaching, as more time was spent managing behaviour than actually teaching, which added to the overall pressure and workload. I was arguing with pupils over basic things such as going to the toilet, drinking water.
“You’re firefighting all day – it stops being about teaching,” Charlotte says, adding that increased bureaucracy also took the focus away from educating. “It’s not even about teaching anymore – it’s paperwork, inspections, and constant scrutiny,” she claims.
“There’s a lack of trust. Even your planning time, you’re expected to sit in school to do it. You’re not treated like a professional.” This led to late nights on her laptop, unable to spend quality time with her family that left her totally ‘drained’.
“I’d walk through the door completely drained. I’d still be on my laptop in the evenings, planning, marking, catching up. It never really stopped. I was exhausted and burnt out, and then I’d come home and didn’t have the energy for my own children. I hated that.”
Last year things came to a head, and Charlotte decided she needed to make a major change to improve her quality of life, and ensure she wasn’t missing out on the important years whilst her children are young. “I got to January last year and just thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I just knew I didn’t want to feel that exhausted anymore.
“It was a build-up, especially after having my own children. The role felt increasingly inflexible, and I found that I was bringing the stress home with me, which pushed me to make a change.
“I wanted something where I could still teach, but also have a life,” she explains. Luckily, Charlotte found a place of work that fits in with her life, and is adaptable to her personal life: Minerva Virtual Academy.
The online school allows her to work fully remotely from home, which crucially means she sees a lot more of her two kids, and gets to focus on teaching maths, the part of her job she really enjoys. “I can go to a gym class before my children wake up, come home to give them breakfast, walk them to school, and still be ready to start teaching by 9am,” she says about her new role, which she started in 2025.
“I would never go back to a classroom now,” she says about her new job, that allows her to take part in the school runs. “The role has given me a much better balance between my career and family life, which just wasn’t possible before.”
It’s massively improved her quality of life, and her day-to-day mood, she claims. “I’m not exhausted anymore, I’ve got energy and I haven’t felt overly stressed for a year now. My husband says it’s changed all of our lives.
“I’m more present [at home], and I’m not snapping at the kids because I’m drained. They’ve got a mum who is actually there.”
Her new place of work – a private online school for secondary age pupils in the UK – has even commissioned a study that indicates just under three quarters of teachers (74 percent) across the country have contemplated stepping away from their profession because they are struggling with symptoms of burnout.
Education Support’s Teacher Wellbeing Survey indicates that 36 percent of teachers are “at risk of probable clinical depression” and that 77 percent of teachers in the UK “experience symptoms of poor mental health due to work”.
The National Education Union’s figures from 2024 show that 41 percent of teachers think their workload is “unmanageable” and 68 percent of those surveyed said that a big cause of stress was a poor work-life balance.
