Poor wellbeing and high depressive symptoms were both associated with presenteeism among our sample of teachers, and individuals with high depressive symptoms were also more than twice as likely to have taken sickness absence in the previous month, which resonates with other workplace studies showing such associations (Gandy et al., 2014; Jain et al., 2013). This is the first study to show these associations among teachers, and contributes to a gap that has been identified in the literature regarding the impact of poor teacher mental health on student learning (Bajorek et al., 2014).