Department for Education: Sick Leave

(asked on 14th May 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many and what proportion of officials in his Department took sick leave for reasons relating to stress in the last 12 months; what proportion that leave was of total sick leave taken in his Department; and what the cost was to his Department of officials taking sick leave over that period.


Answered by
Anne Milton Portrait
Anne Milton
This question was answered on 21st May 2019

The number of employees in the department who were absent for stress-related reasons from 1 May 2018 to 30 April 2019 was 119, which represented 1.84% of the total workforce and 11.26% of the overall sickness absence.

The estimated cost of this sickness absence is £3,456,595 (based on a calculation of total working days lost multiplied by the daily rate of the department’s median salary).

The department is committed to the health and wellbeing of all our employees, including helping them to manage stress in the workplace. There is a range of guidance and services in place to support the department’s employees such as Mental Health First Aiders, Employee Assistance Programmes and Fair Treatment Ambassadors.

Sickness absence data for the Civil Service from 1999 to the first quarter of 2018 is published on GOV.UK and available at the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/civil-service-sickness-absence.

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