in the classroom
We’ve got data on some of the richest,
most well-resourced schools in the
country, where social capital’s actually
very low, and the reverse: some of the
most under-resourced, challenging
schools in the country, where social
capital’s very high. That protective effect
still happens in both of those situations.
We have high and low SES schools in every
section of this on the continuum, and they
are also in every state and territory, and in
every sector.
It’s clearly an interesting phenomenon
that’s going on in some schools and not
in others that’s unrelated to a whole lot of
other things that you would think are the
normal key drivers around educational
improvement and the flow-on effects of
better health and wellbeing for principals,
and presumably teachers and kids too.
While we’re on more positive findings,
salaries seem to be rising.
I haven’t got huge amounts of data on this.
We simply asked schools what principals'
annual salaries are, and they've been
trending up.
Compared to the rest of the population,
principals are relatively well paid, but the
range is quite big. It’s interesting when you
look at the independent sector; we have
some of the lowest paid principals in the
country, but also the highest.
So the independent sector sets the range
and then the Catholic system and the
government system are far more squeezed
up in the middle, because they have more
bureaucratic systems with policies related to
student numbers and other things. Whereas
the independent sector goes from the very
wealthy schools through to the very small
schools that are based on a philosophy or a
religious group, where they may have small
numbers of students, very low resources,
but be quite happy about that because of
their philosophical bent, if you like.
There’s a lot of research out there that
shows salary makes a difference only to a
certain level, then after that it doesn’t make
any difference to wellbeing.
For a lot of principals, the sorts of things
that would help them more are not really
money related. It’s more like workload and
administrative tasks that they feel are a
waste of their time.
There was an interesting finding about job
satisfaction: it appeared to be quite high.
Yes, normally job satisfaction is a high
predictor for doing well at work, but in
education, it doesn’t seem to be so. We
can have high job satisfaction and high
burnout happening in the same person,
and in fact, that’s what we’re showing.
We’re trying to work out why that’s so.
You found a number of negative things
associated with principals' work. Can you
tell me about the most troubling ones?
The two factors principals have
complained about the most, as in causing
them stress, is the sheer volume of work
they have to get through, and not enough
teaching and learning.
Now, that relates to the amount of
administrative work they have to do
because of accountability, and a lot of
that work they feel could be done by
people probably in central offices of
departments of education, not necessarily
with education qualifications, because
they’re typically administrative rather than
educative. They feel stressed because
they’re spending their time doing that,
rather than teaching and learning.
But the most worrying thing, I think,
are the trends for two other stressors: the
stress they feel about the mental health
issues of their students, and the mental
health issues of their staff, which have been
rapidly increasing across the life of the
survey so far. At the rate the current trends
are travelling, they’ll be the number-one
stressors in about two years.
Now, I think that’s an indicator of
a society under stress. There’s lots of
evidence that, as a society, we have
become increasingly anxious. And there
are some issues around school choice,
where parents are encouraged, obviously,
to be consumers of education by
choosing the right school and all of that.
I’m in Melbourne, where a lot of kids are
travelling for many kilometres and long
periods of time in the morning and the
evening to get to a school that’s a long
way from where they live, and they may
be passing five, 10, 12 schools before they
get to the school that they’re actually
attending, because of this idea that school
choice is really important.
I think that creates a whole lot of anxiety
for parents, because when you widen
the choice the way we have done in
Australia, how do you know if you’ve made
the right decision? There’s this constant
worry about, “I need the school to keep
confirming to me that my child’s doing as
well as he or she possibly can in the school
that I’ve chosen.”
That then reflects in NAPLAN results and
the kind of difficulties that principals often
face when the results come out each year,
with schools and teachers and principals
being blamed for results that are not as
high as the parents would hope for.
This also creates tension for students.
The Senate did an inquiry a few years
ago into the unintended consequence of
NAPLAN, an