GOOD pay, long holidays, short working hours - this life of the teacher to very many people outside the world of education. This popular idea, it seems, couldn't be further from the truth. Studies show that teaching is now the second most stressful occupation after mining, according to the clinical psychologist, Dr Tony Humphreys.

"Teachers have gone up the scale and are now ahead of nurses, doctors and policemen in terms of stress," he says. In 1994 10,000 working days were lost due to teacher absenteeism which was mostly related to stress.

Dr Ciaran O'Boyle, professor of psychology at the Royal College of Surgeons, Dublin, explains: "Stress is an individual thing. One person may view a situation as stressful while another will view it as a challenge."

Stress occurs, he says, when a person perceives a mismatch between the demands of a job and his or her ability to cope. Are such teachers then in the wrong jobs? Should they be doing something else? Absolutely not, says Humphreys. "It's not the teachers' faults - it's the system that has let them down."

What are the main causes of classroom stress?

GOOD STAFF RELATIONSHIPS are vital. Where you have a cohesive, co-operative and supportive staff stress is rare. "There's a lot of fear in many of our in staffrooms," says Humphreys. "It's the same in many organisations including private industry, but they have human resource departments to deal with this. In teaching there's no HR."

O'Boyle confirms this: "Research shows that jobs which enjoy good social support are less stressful. It's often assumed that social support is very high in schools, but in fact many of the teachers I've talked to are extremely isolated, rarely see their colleagues and spend most of their time in the classroom alone with their pupils." In schools where staff enjoy more group activities and social outings, there is less stress, he says. SOCIETAL CHANGES are a major source of stress in the classroom. "Everything that happens in society impinges on the classroom," says Humphreys. "Be it the changing value systems, marital breakdown or unemployment, teachers are expected to cope. Yet they lack the appropriate knowledge and expertise. In my teacher training nothing prepared me to deal with the emotional and behavioural problems that I found in both pupils and staff."

Increasingly students are presenting difficulties in the classroom as a result of broken homes or dysfunctional families. Other children are under great parental pressure to perform and please.

According to O'Boyle, many teachers put themselves under pressure by failing to distinguish between areas in which they have control and areas in which they have no control. "Teachers are expected to manage the country's social problems, but while expectations are escalating, there is no corresponding increase in resources."

ROLE OVERLOAD is another significant cause of stress, according to Humphreys. "Teachers are being asked to do more and more. The curriculum changes and additions of recent years have been enormous. Our exam culture too, with its ever increasing pressure on performance, serves only to make matters worse." Teachers need to shout `stop', but as a profession they are quite conformist. Although they are aware of their needs they are not asserting them.

LEADERSHIP is a major issue in schools. Just because you've been teaching successfully for 20 years doesn't mean that you will make an effective principal, Humphreys argues. However, personal development and management training are not requirements of the Department of Education.

"Many principals are required to undertake complicated management jobs without adequate training," notes O'Boyle. "The management development of senior teachers is vital."

Personal development also has a role to play. "Anyone in a position of responsibility needs to be able to look at him or herself to ensure that they don't bring their own emotional baggage and load it on to others," Humphreys says. "If you're a perfectionist, for example, who must prove yourself constantly, you will put pressure on your students to perform. If, however, you are apathetic and demotivated you won't care whether the children learn or not."

A teacher who is hurt or resentful may be aggressive in class and take it out on children. An insecure principal may hide away and fail to hold staff meetings, thereby ensuring that the staff lose out. Similarly an inflexible principal will fail to listen to staff, Humphreys says.

PEOPLE don't have any I sense of how difficult it is nowadays to teach," says Humphreys. They can understand the problems of parenting - but those problems are vastly magnified for teachers who have to cope with classes of up to 40 children.

Teaching has become what is now termed a "high strain job," O'Boyle points out. This means that the demands of the job are high and the decision latitudes are low. The ideal and least stressful job is one in which both demands and decision latitudes are high. To address this imbalance, changes need to be made at organisational level, he says.