Ireland’s Alternative Education Staff Carry Hidden Stress Burden, National Study Finds

Behind the doors of Ireland’s Youthreach centres, a quiet workforce crisis is unfolding. A new mixed-methods study published in BMC Public Health has found that the staff who teach and support some of the country’s most vulnerable young people are themselves experiencing significant stress, with the strain falling unevenly across job roles. The research, led by Justin Laiti of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and University College Dublin, together with colleagues at Dublin City University, provides the most detailed national picture yet of wellbeing needs in Ireland’s alternative secondary education sector, and it suggests that the people holding this safety net together may be running on empty.

Youthreach is Ireland’s principal alternative education programme for early school leavers, offering young people aged roughly 15 to 20 a second chance at education and training outside the mainstream school system. The students who arrive at these centres often carry complex needs: disrupted schooling histories, mental health difficulties, family instability, and social challenges that mainstream classrooms were not designed to accommodate. Staff members, who include teachers, resource persons, and centre coordinators, frequently act as educators, counsellors, and advocates all at once. Yet despite these demanding roles, several Youthreach staffing positions do not receive the same benefits and protections as their counterparts in mainstream schools, a structural inequity that frames the entire study.

The research unfolded in three phases. First, the team conducted a national survey to assess overarching wellbeing needs among Youthreach staff across the country. Second, they held a focus group with staff at a single Youthreach centre in County Dublin to explore those needs in greater depth. Third, they ran co-design sessions with the same group of staff to generate ideas for digital wellbeing tools. This layered design allowed the researchers to move from broad statistical patterns to lived experience and, finally, to practical solutions imagined by the workers themselves, an approach increasingly favoured in public health research because it keeps end users at the centre of intervention design.

The national survey drew 233 responses from Youthreach staff spanning every position type, including teachers, resource persons, and coordinators, and reached 22 of the Republic of Ireland’s 26 counties, giving the findings genuine national coverage. Participants completed the Perceived Stress Scale, a widely validated ten-item instrument that measures how unpredictable, uncontrollable, and overloaded respondents find their lives. When the researchers analysed the scores using analysis of variance followed by Tukey’s post-hoc test, a statistical procedure that pinpoints exactly which groups differ from one another, a clear pattern emerged. Coordinators reported significantly higher stress than teachers, with a p-value of 0.017, and resource persons also showed significantly elevated stress relative to teachers, with a p-value of 0.001. In plain terms, the likelihood that these differences arose by chance is very low, and the burden appears concentrated in the roles with the broadest pastoral and administrative responsibilities.

When asked what would actually help, resource persons and coordinators converged on a deceptively simple request: access to sufficient recuperative time. Unlike teachers, whose schedules include structured breaks and holidays anchored to the mainstream school calendar, staff in these other roles often lack equivalent recovery periods, even though their work involves continuous emotional engagement with young people in crisis. The finding echoes a well-established body of occupational health literature showing that recovery time is a critical buffer against burnout, and that its absence accelerates emotional exhaustion. For a sector already struggling to recruit and retain experienced staff, the implication is stark: without protected time to recover, the most stressed employees are the most likely to leave.

The focus group at the Dublin centre added texture and urgency to the survey numbers. Staff described working conditions that would raise eyebrows in any sector: a lack of specialised support for students with complex needs, meaning that educators frequently absorb challenges they are not trained to manage; difficult physical and organisational working environments; and a heavy emotional burden arising from deep involvement in students’ lives. Participants also flagged a persistent shortage of resources available to staff themselves. One sentiment captured in the study’s title summed up the group’s identity and its isolation: these are the educators who teach the students that mainstream cannot teach, yet the scaffolding around them is thinner than what mainstream schools provide.

What makes the study particularly timely is its exploration of digital solutions. Far from being technophobic, the focus group participants expressed genuine interest in digital wellbeing supports, and this interest matured into concrete ideas during the co-design sessions. Two concepts took centre stage: wearable stress monitors that could give staff real-time awareness of their physiological state, and support applications designed to deliver wellbeing resources directly to their devices. Wearable technology of this kind, which typically tracks markers such as heart rate variability, has gained traction in workplace health research as a way of making invisible stress visible before it accumulates into exhaustion. The co-design approach meant that these tools were not imposed from above but shaped by the people who would actually use them, increasing the likelihood that any future deployment would fit the realities of a Youthreach working day.

Yet the researchers are careful not to oversell the technological angle. Despite the enthusiasm for digital resources, the study’s conclusion is unambiguous: structural supports remained the paramount concern for Youthreach staff. An app or a wearable device cannot compensate for the absence of equitable employment benefits, adequate staffing, specialised student support services, or protected recuperative time. The staff outlined specific requests that the authors argue must be addressed to support wellbeing across all positions and to secure the sustainability of the programme itself. In other words, digital tools may eventually serve as a useful layer of support, but they sit atop a foundation that currently has structural cracks.

The stakes extend well beyond staff welfare. Youthreach exists to serve early school leavers, a population for whom disengagement from education carries lifelong consequences in employment, health, and social outcomes. If chronic stress drives experienced staff out of the sector, the continuity of relationships that makes alternative education effective is broken, and the students most in need of stability lose the adults they trust. The study’s authors frame staff wellbeing not as a peripheral human-resources issue but as a precondition for the continued benefits the programme delivers to young people. Supporting the supporters, in this reading, is a direct investment in the resilience of Ireland’s most at-risk students.

The research, which received ethics approval from the Dublin City University Research Ethics Committee and was funded through a PhD grant partnership between the U.S. Fulbright Program and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, arrives as governments across Europe grapple with teacher shortages and rising reports of educator burnout. Its message travels well beyond Ireland’s borders: wherever alternative education depends on a small, dedicated workforce absorbing the needs of the most complex students, that workforce requires the same protections, resources, and recovery time as its mainstream counterparts. The study’s blend of hard statistics, qualitative depth, and participatory design offers a template for how other countries might diagnose, and begin to treat, the hidden stress burden carried by the educators who go where mainstream systems cannot.

Subject of Research: Staff wellbeing and digital support needs in Ireland's alternative education sector

Article Title: “We teach the students that mainstream can’t teach”: a mixed-methods examination of staff wellbeing, resources, and digital support potential in Ireland’s alternative education sector

Article References: Laiti, J., Burke, L., Byrne, E., Belton, S., Goss, H., & Dunne, P. J. (2026). “We teach the students that mainstream can’t teach”: a mixed-methods examination of staff wellbeing, resources, and digital support potential in Ireland’s alternative education sector. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29812-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29812-w

Keywords: Youthreach, alternative education, staff wellbeing, teacher stress, Perceived Stress Scale, early school leavers, digital wellbeing, co-design, burnout, occupational health, Ireland, BMC Public Health