Technostress in secondary education settings

Teaching is considered a highly regulated profession in Ireland. Teachers employed in state-funded secondary schools are required to be registered with the Irish Teaching Council, while the Department of Education and Skills is responsible for the coordination of teachers’ employment (Heinz et al, 2017). Employment relations within the sector are regulated by legislation and collective agreements reached between this government department and the main trade unions, the Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland (ASTI), and the Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) (Murphy et al, 2019). As a profession, teaching is viewed as one which has many advantages from a work-life balance (WLB) perspective, though research indicates that there is a need to introduce greater WLB policies and programmes for the teaching community (Miryala and Chiluka, 2012). International research argues that the commodification of education is contributing to the intensification of work and to greater performance management around teachers’ work in other contexts (Fitzgerald et al, 2019; Frederickson, 2009; Merceille and Murphy, 2017). As such, the nature and context of work has changed and now shares more similarities with the private sector, in particular in relation to demands around working time, and the development of an “always on” culture (MacDowell and Kinman, 2017). The drivers for this can be viewed as symptomatic of broader societal changes brought about through enhanced technology (Mullan and Wacjman, 2019; Moore, 2017).