SECTION
4
Section 4: Retention.
How can the sector retain its staff?
Reasons to stay in an independent school.
The financial, staff, and student outcomes consequences of high turnover in schools are potentially severe (e.g. Watlington et al., 2010). Mitigating and preventing these negative consequences requires that leaders understand where to focus their efforts to maximise the chances of retaining quality staff in the right roles.
In our survey, we approached this by asking staff directly—as we did with their reasons for joining their school—for the top three factors that would cause them to stay in their roles over the next 12 months, and the top three factors that might cause them to leave.
Chart 11 shows the most frequently-cited reasons for staff to stay in their current role. Of the top five themes to emerge, all were related either to specific aspects of their role (e.g. career growth opportunities) or relational aspects of working in the school (e.g. relationships with colleagues and peers).
Over a third of participants reported that their school provided a welcoming/safe/ supportive environment for both staff and students alike, and 12% of responses reference the community culture of the school. The strength of these cultural and relational aspects of school workplaces proved a recurring theme throughout much of the survey.
Chart 11: “What are the top 3 factors that would cause you to stay in your role over the next 12 months?” – prevalence of recurring themes overall.
Reasons to leave an independent school.
When we asked the factors that would cause staff to leave their role over the next year, an entirely different set of themes emerged, with workload and work-life balance the most frequently-cited driver. Personal factors also emerged more prominently than in previous sections—in this case these included a combination of personal health and family reasons, and a need to relocate.
Over a third of participants reported that their school provided a welcoming/safe/ supportive environment for both staff and students alike, and 12% of responses reference the community culture of the school. The strength of these cultural and relational aspects of school workplaces proved a recurring theme throughout much of the survey.
Chart 12: “What are the top 3 factors that would cause you to leave your role in the next 12 months?” – top recurring themes overall.
After breaking this data down, the same top three themes emerged for schools of all sizes, albeit in slightly different order. As school size increases, workload and work-life balance becomes an increasingly important factor in how staff think about their future at their school.
The issue of workload was especially prominent among teachers and leaders, as shown in the breakdown of the top three factors for each role type in Chart 13. Again, the organisational culture of the school was a top-three issue for respondents of all role types.
Chart 13: “What are the top 3 factors that would cause you to leave your role in the next 12 months?” – top recurring themes by role type.
Managing workloads sustainably.
That workload features so prominently in the reasons why staff may leave their roles is nothing new: PeopleBench’ own State of the Sector research project has highlighted this as a top priority for sector leaders to address for the past several years (e.g. PeopleBench, 2024), as have other researchers in numerous contexts (e.g. Carroll et al., 2022).
Knowing specifically what to change and how to go about changing it to reduce or mitigate workload, however, is potentially more complex, as it requires addressing a combination of systemic, organisational and individual factors.
Here, we asked respondents to identify the activities they’d ideally spend more time on in a typical week (see blue bars in Chart 14), and those they’d ideally spend less time on (red bars). The clear stand-out in this data is the high proportion of staff who sought to reduce the time they spend on administrative tasks. This is not surprising—administrative tasks have been shown to contribute to staff perceptions of time poverty in schools (Creagh, 2025).
Chart 14: Work activities staff would ideally do more of (blue bars) or less of (red bars) in a typical week.
We observed a linear pattern in this breakdown of this data—the larger the school, the higher the proportion of staff who wanted to reduce their administrative workload, as shown in Chart 15.
Reducing administrative workload was also a priority for staff of all role types, but most prominently for teachers and leaders.
Chart 15: Work activities staff would ideally do less of – top 3 by school size.
Addressing employees’ flexibility expectations.
As noted earlier in this report, flexible work practices are relatively uncommon, both in this sample of Queensland independent schools and in the sector more broadly.
To understand whether current practices align with employee expectations, we asked participants in our survey which kinds of flexible would make the most positive difference to their work life.
As Chart 16 shows, only 4% of respondents indicated a preference for no flexible arrangements. The most frequently-cited arrangement was flexible hours of work (i.e. varying work start and finish times), which was selected by over a third of respondents.
Cognisant of the historical barriers to adopting flexible work practices in the sector, we asked respondents to identify “What challenges would need to be overcome to implement flexible work in your school?”
Chart 16: If you don’t currently have access to flexible work arrangements, which of the following would make the most positive difference to your work life?” – top recurring themes overall
As Chart 17 shows, only 7% of respondents reported that there were no challenges to overcome. Among the remaining respondents, it was clear that in many schools introducing flexible work practices would involve a combination of scheduling changes and recruitment of additional staff—when combined these accounted for almost half of responses. The other factors cited typically related in some way to establishing a rationale and support for the change (among leaders, parents and students) or ensuring that equity was maintained for staff in different roles.
Chart 17: “What barriers would need to be overcome to implement flexible work in your school?” – top recurring themes overall.
Building and protecting positive culture.
Generally, the results presented in this report indicate that organisational culture is a consistent strength among the Queensland independent schools participating in this project (see Section 2), and an important attractor of talent (see Section 3). We also found, however, that where culture goes awry or does not align with staff values or expectations, this can contribute to employees’ decisions to leave.
When participants were asked “If you could change one thing to improve the culture where you work, what would it be?”, responses underscored the importance of creating sustainable workloads for staff and supporting staff collaboration, consistent with previous sections of this report. Encouragingly, the third most common theme in responses to this question was that no change was required to a school’s current culture. This theme featured among the top three for schools of all sizes, but it was the most common theme for staff in the smallest schools.
Consistent with earlier findings, the importance of addressing workload as a means of improving organisational culture tended to increase as school size increased—it was the top theme for schools with over 1,000 students.
Chart 18: “If you could change one thing to improve the culture where you work, what would it be?” – top recurring themes overall.
Key takeaways.
Examining the factors most likely to cause staff to stay or leave their role, we found that:
SECTION
4
Leaders in the sector might consider:
Bringing workloads under control, which will involve a combination of:
- Organisational factors (e.g. organisational structures and reporting lines; standardised processes and policies for how work is done)
Role factors (e.g. distinguishing responsibilities between roles)
Behavioural factors (e.g. how staff are working together in teams), and
Technological factors (e.g. using AI tools).
Normalising career planning conversations with staff to provide visibility of the opportunities ahead of them at the school.
Reviewing how to introduce additional scope for flexible work without compromising equity or the quality of student and parent experience. Establishing a small-scale pilot and evaluating its outcomes would be an approachable way to start. To dismiss these arrangements without trialling them in schools would be to miss a significant opportunity.