Investigating Whether Law Schools in the UK and Australia Are Workplaces that Support the Wellbeing of Law Teachers

Abstract

There is now an extensive evidence-base across numerous countries demonstrating that approximately one-third of law students experience a decline in their wellbeing during their first year of legal education. As a result, law schools are seeking to enact strategies to prevent this decline and to positively support law student wellbeing-both through extra-curricula and curricula approaches. The success of these strategies depends largely on the capacity of law teachers and other faculty staff, and yet there is currently insufficient research on whether law teachers are well and able to support the wellbeing of their students. This chapter presents the results to-date of a longitudinal study conducted in the UK and Australia, both pre-COVID and post-COVID, considering the quality of the working life of law teachers in terms of the context of its impact on their capacity to promote law student wellbeing. We examine some of the prominent challenges that law teachers identify and recount some of their constructive suggestions which may assist law school managers and leaders in enacting structural and cultural change in support of the wellbeing of legal academics.