The role of leadership, organisational climate and engagement in driving school improvement
Teachers play an essential role in a student’s academic and socio-emotional development. The extent to which teachers themselves feel supported and encouraged at work gives them the efficacy and resources to engage in their critical role.
School climate – defined as a staff member’s perception of what the school is like in terms of practices, policies, procedures, leadership, routines, and rewards – is critical in creating the enabling conditions for teachers to achieve their goals. This project investigates several questions related to how school leadership and school climate influences teacher and student performance and wellbeing.
Researchers from UniSA’s Centre for Workplace Excellence (CWeX) are looking to understand the differences between high and low performing schools in terms of the aspects of school climate.
This project also investigates how school leadership can influence school climate over time, and how peer-to-peer interactions among school teachers can enhance the bottom-up emergence of a healthy school climate.
The link between school climate for teachers, their wellbeing and their students’ performance, is also being examined by our researchers, as well as how climate perceptions from multiple stakeholders such as parents, regional partnership leaders, principals, students and teachers interact to predict school improvement.
This problem-focused research will be available to guide best practice for schools, leading to better employee wellbeing for teachers which flows down to better outcomes for student performance.
