December in schools has always carried its own kind of weather — a subtle emotional climate that is not captured in policy documents, timetables or workload analyses, yet shapes the experience of teachers and leaders with remarkable force. It is a month that does not simply follow the rhythm of the autumn term but exposes the cumulative strain of it. The fatigue that emerges in these weeks is not the fatigue of a long day or a busy week. It is a kind of saturation — the natural consequence of having held far too much, for far too long, without the opportunity to fully process any of it.

What makes December so distinctive is its emotional density. Teachers enter the month already stretched by eleven or twelve weeks of uninterrupted relational labour: the pastoral conversations that unfold quietly in between lessons, the safeguarding disclosures that sit heavy long after the classroom door closes, the subtle shifts in tone that hint at a child’s private world unravelling, the ways in which your nervous system absorbs every flicker of dysregulation around you. Each of these moments requires presence, judgement, and empathy — and each draws from a finite store of emotional energy.

By December, that store is inevitably depleted. Even the most dedicated teachers, those with the strongest professional identities and deepest commitment to their pupils, find themselves caught in an unspoken tension: they are still giving, still adjusting, still absorbing, but their internal resources are no longer replenishing at the rate required. This is the point at which small things begin to feel disproportionately heavy. A minor conflict between pupils, a routine email, a request that would have been manageable in October — all of it becomes amplified in the body, not because teachers are becoming less resilient, but because their systems are nearing saturation.

Leaders experience this phenomenon in a different, often more complex way. December is the month where leadership shifts from strategy to containment. The emotional temperature of the school rises: behaviour becomes more erratic, staff patience thins, families bring anxieties forward in search of reassurance, and the whisper of deadlines is replaced by the crescendo of “just one more thing.” Leaders absorb these pressures, not necessarily through visible heroics, but through the hundreds of micro-decisions they make each day to maintain stability for others. They manage tone, shape expectations, interpret emotional cues, and hold onto optimism even when their own reserves are running low.

There is a misconception that leadership fatigue in December comes from workload. It does not. It comes from the weight of responsibility — the sense that you are the person who must keep everything coherent even when the structure beneath you is beginning to fray. Leaders rarely talk openly about this strain, not because they are immune to it, but because the culture of leadership has long demanded composure in the face of emotional cost. December simply reveals what has been there all along.

What complicates this month further is that the wider world sees December as a time of festivity, anticipation, and celebration. Teachers and leaders often feel pressure — subtle or otherwise — to match that energy, even when their bodies are quietly signalling exhaustion. There is an implicit expectation that joy must now be performed, that patience must now be infinite, that generosity must extend even when the well is dry. For over-givers — and education attracts more than its share — this pressure is internalised quickly. They become the ones smoothing the rough edges, volunteering “just one more time,” and offering emotional steadiness long after theirs has faltered.

Yet beneath the surface of this social performance lies an important truth: December does not create the exhaustion — it reveals it. And perhaps that is why it feels so intense. When the term begins, teachers can still rely on adrenaline, novelty, and the optimism of new beginnings. By the final month, none of those buffers remain. What teachers and leaders are left with is the reality of what they have carried, the residual imprint of every decision, every emotional exchange, every moment of self-sacrifice that has gone unseen.

The question, then, is not how to survive December, but how to acknowledge its reality with honesty and compassion. Recovery cannot begin until there is acceptance — acceptance that your tiredness is not a failing, that your short temper is not a moral flaw, that your sense of depletion is not evidence of inadequacy. It is simply the body’s truth. And truths that remain unacknowledged have a habit of resurfacing at inopportune moments: through illness, irritability, withdrawal, or the emotional crash that so often arrives the moment the term ends.

What educators need most in December is not resilience training or motivational platitudes. They need space — space to recognise what has been held, space to recalibrate, space to rest without guilt. Leaders need something further still: permission to be human in a month that rewards self-erasure. The narrative of endless strength has never served leaders; it has merely isolated them.

So as the final days of term approach, perhaps the most important act of leadership — or self-leadership — is to step into honesty. Not performative honesty, but the quiet kind that begins with the simple recognition that you have given much, and that it has cost you something. This December, allow the weight to be acknowledged. In that acknowledgement is the beginning of renewal.