For a school principal, building high-performing teams starts with making their teachers feel valued, supported, and empowered. A 2024 study by Learning Forward found that happier teachers tend to lift student engagement, achievement and wellbeing.
As Australia’s schools face worsening workforce shortages and a myriad of other mounting pressures, principals understand that a positive, purpose-driven culture has never been more vital.
How Australia’s school workforce is evolving
One organisation that has had a firm finger on the pulse of Australia’s education workforce is PeopleBench, a school workforce research and analytics company founded in 2019.
Its founder and CEO, Fleur Johnston said overall the discussion about teacher recruitment and retention in 2025 is fortunately “continuing to mature” as staff wellbeing and workload are now seen less as isolated issues and more as outcomes of deeper systemic pressures in schools.
“Schools and systems are starting to think more deliberately about the connection between their strategic plans, the workforce strategy that is required to underpin successful delivery of their vision and mission, and the interconnected programs and initiatives they may need to progress over time in order to address the root cause of staff wellbeing and work intensity symptoms.”
Another encouraging sign, says Johnston, is that school leaders more sure of what they want to change, and how.
“The new challenge is how schools fit the work and accountabilities associated with organisational change and transformation in to the existing jobs we traditionally have in school leadership structures, and how we support the people who hold those roles with the right professional learning and tools [even the additional staff] to be able to lead these changes well.”
Retention needs more than band-aid solutions
Johnston said national-level thinking can obscure the local realities shaping teacher supply and demand.
“Just as imagining that the Australian housing market is one market is potentially misleading for those planning where we most need to build houses, thinking about the entire nation’s teaching supply as one giant pool is arguably unhelpful to solving local challenges too,” she said.
“Different parts of the country are experiencing the continued global and national decline in teacher supply in different ways.”
Johnston pointed out that in some communities, the ‘desirability’ of their location, the ‘complexity’ of the community they serve or even the cost of living can be deterrents to potential applicants and make recruitment hard.
“Many leaders we talk to are not lamenting small or poor applicant pools – they are lamenting the ever shortening windows of retention that they are able to achieve and the exhaustion that ensues when they are perpetually filling what feels like a leaky bucket,” she said.
“What is certain, is that while we pour money in to supply strategies [creating more grads] and under-invest in strategies which make retention [of highly valuable, already qualified people] more likely, we will continue to struggle to ‘magic up’ enough teachers to keep the bucket full – and we will struggle to deliver the learning experiences our students need and deserve.”
Johnston said that, in practice, many of the school-based efforts aimed at retention tend to be “spot solutions” – a short term focus on teacher wellbeing lived out through some one-off training, a round of improved salary or conditions through EB.
“Ideally, we want schools to benefit from the synergistic relationship between a whole selection of improved experiences along the hire-to-retire journey of working in a school,” she said.
“In order for Principals to offer this to their staff, the school needs a comprehensive multi-year strategy for continuously improving that experience. The strategy needs to be co-designed with staff, and needs to be data, as well as local wisdom, informed.”
Principals need tools, not just expectations
Johnston said while many analytics software solutions claim to support workforce strategy, the PeopleBench platform contains a unique strategy development tool, underpinned by proprietary ML models which have been exclusively trained on K-12 workforce data.
“This means that our products don’t just leave the user with a bunch of data to scratch their heads over,” Johnston said.
“They help the user [who may not be an HR expert] see their own workforce data in a simplified form and in context of sector benchmarks, know which questions to ask, and be pointed in the right direction when it comes to the types of initiatives of programs they might like to try implementing in order to improve their staff attraction, retention and wellbeing outcomes.”
Johnston said the biggest challenge – and opportunity – for school leaders today is adapting to rapid organisational, process and technology change.
“Asking middle leaders and Principals to design and lead significant workforce change and transformation on top of their day jobs as leaders of learning is a recipe for continuing stretch these critical folks so thin we lose them from the sector in ever increasing numbers too,” she said.
“Supporting Principals with new knowledge, language, processes and tools to enable successful organisational transformation, and helping them to reshape the new job families and role types which need to exist in school leadership teams to keep them agile and responsive will be critical to building a sector that can move from just surviving inevitable change – to thriving in it.”