Dr Sam Sims, Research Lead, Ambition Institute
Researchers define working conditions as the policies and shared ways of working that can be influenced by school leaders and that affect staff’s ability to do their jobs well. Decades of research has shown working conditions to be a strong predictor of teacher job satisfaction, burnout and quits.
The difficulty with working conditions is that they’re intangible and multi-faceted. Which of them really matter for teachers and support staff? How should we think about them? What concrete actions could we take to improve them?
I got so captivated by these questions that I spent two years theorising, designing, piloting and validating a questionnaire to help answer them. Around two thousand teachers from around forty schools have now responded to this questionnaire. Based on this programme of research, I think the four most important aspects of working conditions are:
Supportive leadership. This is defined as the exercise of influence and direction setting in order to help teachers achieve their work goals. Notice that this is grounded in teachers’ work goals; though of course these might be influenced by school leaders. I captured this in the questionnaire using items like ‘Leaders recognise it when I do good work’ and ‘Leaders clearly communicate the reasons for which decisions have been made’.
Behaviour policy. This captures the policies and actions taken by school staff to prevent or intervene with unwanted pupil behaviours. Notice the emphasis on policy here – it’s about what leaders say and then do. We measured this using items like ‘I can rely on middle & senior leaders to support me in relation to student behaviour’ and ‘The behaviour policy is properly enforced’.
Collegiality. This refers to teachers working together and supporting each other. What matters most here is the quality of relationships, rather than specific collaborative activities. I captured this using items like ‘I feel comfortable asking colleagues for advice’ and ‘There are opportunities for me to learn from my colleagues’.
Compliance. This is defined as the need to go out of one’s way in order to follow a procedure imposed by a superior. This is different from workload in that it differentiates between purposeful, meaningful activity (‘good’ workload) and pointless or distracting tasks (‘bad’ workload). I captured this using items like ‘I am expected to do things solely for the purpose of generating evidence’ and ‘Data management gets in the way of teaching’.
In the survey data, I found strong relationships between all four of these aspects of working environment and both teacher job satisfaction and intentions to quit. These findings also held when I compared teachers working in different departments/phases in the same school, thereby holding fixed many other whole-school influences on their working lives. Research from the US suggests that a similar set of measures also predicts improvements in pupil achievement, suggesting that improving working conditions may also help more directly with school improvement.
Of course, most school leaders think they are already doing a pretty good job at this stuff. But, like the water in the goldfish bowl, working conditions may decline in quality very gradually. Indeed, with nothing to compare it to, school leaders might not notice the change at all. Trust leaders therefore have a critical role to play in ensuring that working conditions in their schools are helping teachers be the best they can be. Hard data suggests it is worth taking the time to regularly check the water in your schools.
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