The latest Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey has dropped, and despite some small pockets of improvement, the overall findings offer a worrying insight into the state of school leaders’ working conditions and mental health.

Compiled by ACU’s Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, the report argues that it remains unacceptable that too many school leaders are subject to behaviours that are rightly not tolerated in any other professional workplace.

More than half want to quit

Lead researcher Professor Theresa Dicke tells EducationHQ the findings from 2024 should trigger a response from policymakers and school communities.

“…overall it’s still shifted in the wrong direction, with a lot of people experiencing anxiety and depression symptoms, and we still have over half of school leaders indicating an intention to quit, and especially for those with low job satisfaction it jumps up to 80.2 per cent.”

Queensland school leaders recorded the highest intention to quit while those in the ACT scored the lowest.

“Then we’ve seen an increase in physical violence towards principals, we’ve seen – and we still see – threats of violence and lots of the offensive behaviours like bullying, cyberbullying, they’ve all increased,” Dicke reports.

Nearly half of all principals involved in the national study reported experiencing physical violence in their role, while more than half endured threats of violence. Both statistics are at their highest since the annual study launched some 14 years ago.

The latest findings also reveal instances of physical violence have increased by 81.6 per cent since the survey started. Threats of violence was also at its highest since 2011.

Students were responsible for a staggering 95.5 per cent of violent incidents involving school leaders.

“Something to keep in mind while looking at these numbers is these stats don’t always mean that a student walks up and punches the principal.

“It could also mean that two students get into a fight and the school leader goes and tries to break up the fight, and is then subjected to some kind of physical violence, but more on the side…” Dicke cautions.

Professor Theresa Dicke (pictured) says the reslience of Australia's principals remains remarkably high, despite their tough jobs.

In a separate study, researchers asked principals what was at the root of students’ violent behaviour towards them.

The influence of social media, COVID lockdowns and a broader societal trend toward aggression and physical abuse cast at frontline workers were noted as key factors.

Dicke praised Victoria’s introduction of the School Community Safety Order in 2022, which granted principals the right to ban ‘harmful, threatening or abusive’ adults from school grounds.

Last September, Queensland also made a move on this front, bringing in the ‘there’s no excuse for a school abuse’ campaign.

Dicke is hopeful the move’s positive impact will start to show up in next year’s results.  

“[This campaign is] necessary because I think Queensland is having an issue there.

“So, it’s great to see that and our message here would just be, ‘don’t stop now please, continue’…”

Parents and carers were also found to be behind 87.6 per cent of cyber bullying targeting principals last year – a finding Dicke summises could suggest violence is merely shifting from the principals’ office to online.

Principals in ACT, NT and WA schools experienced the highest rates of violence, with NSW the one state showing improvement on this front compared to previous years.

The great paradox of school leadership

“On the bright side, we’ve also seen that school leaders still report surprisingly high job satisfaction and work commitment and self-efficacy, so there’s always been this paradox that school leaders, despite having high rates of burnout, they have high levels of job satisfaction, meaning of work commitment, which just shows how much they love their jobs,” Dicke adds.

The open-ended section of the survey reveals the depth of principals’ commitment and dedication to their work and to their school communities, the researcher notes.

However, there’s an element of heartbreak in there too, she indicates.

“They will say, ‘I love my job, I love working with the students, with the staff, etc, but I just cannot anymore because I’m so exhausted, so depleted’.

“So they just show up every day until breaking point,” Dicke says.

A red flag for mental health

A disturbing 45 per cent of principals triggered a ‘red flag’ email in 2024, signalling risk of self-harm, occupational health problems, or serious impact on their quality of life.

“Some findings are very alarming,” Dicke says.

“For example, the worsening trend in mental health of school leaders where we have a bit of an ambivalent finding – we did find increasing levels of anxiety and depression.

“That said, the ‘tails’ of the distribution of anxiety and depression, so the extreme and severe cases, they have reduced.”

The top five sources of stress for principals include heavy workloads, lack of time to focus on teaching and learning, student-related issues, and the mental health of staff and students.

Some ‘common sense’ policies really need to be acted on to reduce principals’ workload burden and unsustainably high working hours, Dicke argues.

“You can give school leaders personal resources, such as a support person, or an intervention to increase their resilience, which is an important variable here, but that’s just a band-aid - as long as the job itself is so demanding it does not give them any breathers…”

Running on a hunch, Dicke says this is the first survey in years to suggest things “might be turning around” for our school leaders, despite the string of grim findings.  

It’s a sentiment shared by ACU’s Associate Professor Paul Kidson, a former school principal himself.

“This latest report unambiguously highlights that the satisfaction principals feel in their job must be front and centre of any strategies to improve conditions for school leaders and, in turn, the teachers, education support staff, and students who rely on them,” Kidson says.

The researcher argues that Federal Education Minister Jason Clare’s commitment to establish a National Principal Reference Group following the release of last year’s survey was an “outstanding success” that must be upheld beyond the next Federal election.

“…whoever forms government will need to have a resolvable commitment to this cause, as many principals feel we’ve finally started moving in the right direction, and we can’t afford to lose that momentum.”

Dr Paul Kidson, pictured, says federal initiatives to improve principals' working conditions can't afford to drop off.

Dicke is also keen to give a shout out to those principals who opted to participate in the study.

“We know how busy they are, and how time [consuming] it is … the survey is super long, and they still participate, and this is what keeps everything going. This is so important to inform policy and to trigger change.

“So we have a lot of respect and love for our school leaders and participants here.”

The study’s key recommendations include:

  • The government and employers should address heavy workloads as the number one source of stress by providing autonomy, resources, support and intensifying efforts to reduce administrative burdens;
  • Prioritise wellbeing support for school leaders;
  • Consider alternate school leadership models such as co-principalship;
  • Address ‘inappropriate’ behaviour from parents/caregivers towards leaders to maintain a safe and conducive learning environment by implementing mechanisms such as the Victorian School Community Safety Order.