Strong, empowered leaders are key to lifting student outcomes, but just half of principals globally receive training in core areas like teaching, collaboration, and personnel development, a new report reveals.
UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report (GEM Report), released on Thursday, found school leaders lack time to address challenges such as students’ learning levels due to heavy workloads, with a third of teachers in wealthy countries saying they don’t have enough time to focus on learning.
Manos Antoninis, Director of the GEM Report, said this is an issue relatively more related to support rather than training.
“There is a global trend to delegate more decisions to school principals, which tends to be associated with improved education outcomes,” Antoninis told The Educator.
“But in some education systems, more autonomy is accompanied by the introduction of stronger accountability mechanisms. In those systems, there are concerns that the job is becoming stressful with a negative impact on physical and mental health.”
Antoninis noted that Australian leaders have been suffering high levels of principal burnout, especially since COVID-19, which put schools under more pressure.
“This is also confirmed by other surveys in the country,” he said. “In Victoria, workload appeared as the most significant cause of poor principal health and well-being, as principals reported working an average of 55 hours per week.”
Antoninis said an audit of the state’s Principal Health and Wellbeing Strategy found that numerous strategies and initiatives aimed at addressing this issue had not been effective and did not change principals’ working hours.
For its part, South Australia’s Department for Education implemented psychological wellness checks for those at ‘high risk’ and improved post-incident support, specialist psychology consultations for school leaders, and implemented a staff well-being toolkit.
Principal wellbeing strategies are working
Globally, high levels of stress do not yet seem to have impacted negatively job satisfaction, says Antoninis.
“Principals overwhelmingly would still want to pursue their career. Despite frequent references in the media, there is yet no evidence of increased turnover, although accurate estimates are difficult,” he said.
“Australia is similar to many other anglophone countries that have also introduced accountability measures in terms of high reported levels of burnout – and is also characterised by increased difficulties of attracting people to the teaching profession.”
Antoninis said it is now estimated that five of the eight states and territories have frameworks and strategies focused on the health and well-being of school principals – and those jurisdictions have had a positive impact.
“Continuing to evaluate support measures for their effectiveness will be needed.”
A national strategy could turn the tables
Antoninis said a national strategy is needed to ensure meaningful improvements to principal health and wellbeing in Australia.
“The 2024/5 GEM Report, whose views it must be stressed do not reflect those of UNESCO, has noted the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership work on a National Strategy to Address the Abuse of Teachers, School Leaders and Other School Staff,” he said.
“It is clear sign that the issue has become of central concern in the national policy agenda and indeed a contributing factor to increased levels of stress and burnout mentioned above.”
Antoninis said two approaches appear central.
“First, although Australian principals appear, like their peers in other Commonwealth countries, to have twice as much prior management experience before they begin their job as principals in other countries, the requirements of the job are growing, as are the social conditions,” he said.
“Induction courses that help novice principals to start their career are critical especially when they take place with mentoring or coaching programmes. These programmes have been shown to allow novice principals to gain hands-on experience under the guidance of experienced leaders – and need to be prioritised.”
Second, says Antoninis, the approach to leadership for tackling complex problems such as violence needs to involve the school community.
“As many Australian academics have recognized, leadership should be based on distributing leadership functions,” he said.
“Principals are not heroes. They need to recognize their strengths and weaknesses and empower others to take decisions, consult with them, bring in support stuff with their specialised expertise, and ensure that students, parents and community members assume a part of the responsibility for isolating cases of abuse and threat.”
Accountability mechanisms must look at the big picture
When asked how Australian education departments can balance the need for performance-driven leadership with the wellbeing of principals, Antoninis said autonomy needs to come with accountability – to the departments and to the community – for the wise use of resources.
“Such accountability needs to be fair for all schools, public or private, so that rules and expectations are clear. But this is where the problem often begins,” Antoninis said.
“Objective and transparent rules and expectations inevitably tend to be narrow. Schools serve a very wide range of functions and pursue multiple goals most of which cannot be evaluated as part of accountability mechanisms.”
Antoninis said ensuring school safety and well-being should be a key school goal, part of any accountability mechanism, and well beyond a small set of narrowly defined learning outcomes.
“Yet statistics on violence are notoriously difficult to collect so thy cannot reliably be used for monitoring. Conversely, violence incidents can erupt despite the best efforts of the school community,” he said.
“Accountability mechanisms need to be very carefully designed so that they look at the big picture and are primarily formative, not punitive, to ensure they are part of the solution and are not adding to the problem.”
States have room to learn from each other
The report also highlighted the role of political influence on school leadership, with 29% of countries basing teacher hiring and firing decisions on political views – an issue that is adding to instability in education systems, says Antoninis.
Antoninis said Australia is a research leader on issues of education administration, management and leadership, putting it in a strong position to share valuable lessons with the rest of the world.
“It is also a leader in practices such as professional standards that are used for selection, training and career advancement, but it can also learn from itself,” he said.
“[Australia] benefits from a federal structure, which means that there is a lot of scope for states and territories to learn from each other – and there are indeed some structures of such mutual learning, although they do not appear as well developed as they might have been.”
Although this can only be based on impressions, education reforms in Australia do appear more heavily contested from a political perspective than in the rest of the world, with a lot of interest groups pushing in different directions, says Antoninis.
“Leadership after all is a process of social influence, where leaders try to maximize the efforts of others towards particular education goals. But how these goals are formulated and whose voices are heard is of course a major question,” he said.
“Various political entities often see in education an arena where the political contest can also be played out. However, this may not be in the best interest of education which, as a social endeavour, has to reflect broad consensus to move forward.”
And even that is not enough, says Antoninis.
“In Australia, there have been important moments where major problems such as inequality in school financing have been tackled through independent commissions, but the consensus reached on paper has not been followed through by systematic implementation of these recommendations.”