in the classroom
Stressed but satisfied
A new report reveals that violence against principals is worse than ever.
Philip Riley interviewed by Loren Smith
Principals are burnt out and embroiled in conflict, yet somehow still love their jobs. This is the finding of a recent survey by the Institute for Positive Psychology & Education. To date, around half of all principals have contributed to the annual Australian Principals Health and Wellbeing Survey, whose reports paint an alarming picture of school management.
This year, violence against principals is worse than ever. Principals are now 8.4 times more likely to be assaulted than a member of the general population. Other report findings include:
• Similar to previous years, around 27 per cent of principals work more than 61 hours per week. This has been shown to adversely affect health, including mental health, and to limit productivity.
• Key sources of stress include the quantity of work and a lack of time to teach and learn.
• Almost half of principals experience threats of violence. One in three experience actual violence. These rates have risen dramatically over the years, as has the rate of adult-on-adult bullying.
• Salaries have consistently risen and now average $ 131,000 per year. Women are paid $ 5000 less than men, on average.
• Principals are more satisfied with their jobs than the average person, yet their wellbeing is lower than that of the average person.
Registered psychologist Associate Professor Philip Riley, from the Australian Catholic University, oversaw the project and authored the report. A former school principal, he is well placed to reflect on the data personally. Education Review asked him to do just that, as well as explain its consequences in further detail.
ER: As a former principal, how do your experiences compare to those of current principals? PR: Well, I stopped being a principal in 2004, but these same issues existed at the time, and it’ s only increased since then.
I have an enormous amount of sympathy for principals because I’ ve been in the role myself, but I also think the conditions they’ re working under now are vastly more complex and difficult.
Was there a striking difference between this year ' s findings and last year ' s? No, the trends have been similar across the full seven years of the survey. I guess the good news that’ s coming out of the last couple of years is that we’ ve been measuring social capital and looking at that in a bit more detail, and there’ s clearly some protective processes going on when the social capital is high in a school.
Now, we do only have the principal’ s perspective on that, and social capital is a pretty complex set of theoretical constructs, and we’ re only measuring one part of that in the survey, and because it’ s a quantitative survey, it’ s fairly simplistic. We’ re just asking particular questions and we get numbers as responses. But when social capital is high, the principals are reporting lower numbers on all of the negative indicators. So lower burnout, lower cognitive stress, lower physical stress, lower rates of depression. It’ s really good.
Now, the other really good news about that is there’ s no relationship between social capital and [ socioeconomic status ].
16 | educationreview. com. au