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Section 1: Distinctive Workplace.
What distinguishes independent school workplaces?
Independent schools are well-positioned in a rapidly changing education sector employment market.
Their scale, relative autonomy in curriculum design and operational matters, and localised leadership and decision-making mean that they are often able to adapt to changes faster than their systemic counterparts. In many ways, where independent schools lead, others follow.
This agility, however, comes at a potential price. Without access to the centralised support functions available in school systems, leaders in independent schools must be extremely discerning in where they invest their finite time, energy, and financial resources. In the workforce context, this requires a shrewd understanding of what employees (and candidates) value, where the school meets these expectations, and where it has opportunities to grow.
What do Queensland independent schools do well?
To understand the strengths of Queensland independent schools from the staff perspective, we asked survey participants to describe in their own words “What does your school do well?”. Chart 3 illustrates the top themes to emerge from this open text data and the percentage of responses that referenced each theme.
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 3: “In your view, what does your school do well?” – overall recurring themes.
Staff sentiment.
Another way to understand the character of a school workplace is through the lens of staff sentiment: shared perceptions and attitudes regarding how employees feel about their place in the school.
We explored staff sentiment by asking staff how they felt about various aspects of working at their school. PeopleBench’s custom Natural Language Processing (NLP) models (a machine learning method for interpreting and understanding language in the education context specifically) enabled us to classify and quantify these responses into categories based on their tone (positive, neutral, or negative) and identify the themes within each category.
Chart 4 shows a breakdown of these sentiment categories and themes for staff responses to the question: “In one word, how do you feel about your role today?”. The majority (63%) of participants’ sentiment toward their role was positive, including themes such as: feeling content or stable in their role; feeling energised or engaged by their role; and feeling optimistic for the future.
Chart 4: “In one word, how do you feel about your role today?” – overall sentiment + themes.
Organisational culture in independent schools.
Organisational culture refers to the shared values, beliefs, and practices that shape the behaviour and interactions of individuals within an organisation, encompassing the norms that influence how work is done and how employees relate to one another (Schein, 2010). Put simply, the organisational culture of a school is ‘how we do things around here’.
In PeopleBench’s research and practice exploring organisational culture in Australian schools, we have found that cultural factors bear significant correlations to staff outcomes such as turnover—the more positively the staff perceive a school’s culture, the higher the rates of staff retention.
Organisational culture shapes not only what it’s like to work in a school, but also what it’s like for students to learn in that environment. It is a critical yet sometimes misunderstood construct, and while many leaders have a sense of what they intend their school’s culture to be, they are often not able to articulate the culture they currently have, as staff experience it.
Chart 5 shows the sentiment and themes present in participants’ responses to the question “In one word, how would you describe the culture where you work?”. Over three quarters of responses to this question reflected positive perceptions of culture, including strong themes of collaboration and cohesion, supportiveness, and kindness and caring.
To validate these themes, we also asked participants to choose two descriptors that best fit their school’s organisational culture from a list of options (the options were drawn from our research analysing our culture data from schools across Australia). The most frequently chosen descriptors Supportive, Collaborative, and Engaged.
Chart 5: “In one word, how would you describe the culture where you work?” – overall sentiment + themes.
2 Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter Score and Net Promoter System are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.
Key takeaways.
Queensland independent schools are positive places to be. Results from our survey suggest that:
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Leaders in the sector might consider:
Finding ways to acknowledge and celebrate what makes their school a welcoming place to work—chances are it will include some of the strengths outlined here.
Articulating the specific aspects of organisational culture that resonate with current staff so these can be used in attraction and recruitment campaigns for future staff.
Prioritising the preservation of these strengths—make it clear what behaviours are aligned vs not aligned with the culture, and appropriately manage behaviours which are not aligned.