Teachers’ Working Environments

Throughout the 2021/22 academic year, we are delighted to be partnering with Dr Sam Sims to offer all TDT network schools an exciting opportunity to be involved in an exciting national research project looking at staff satisfaction, wellbeing and retention. 

Alongside our own unique TDT Diagnostic Review, network schools can now request exclusive access to a questionnaire carefully developed by researchers at UCL Institute of Education, in which teachers will be asked about five aspects of the working environment which research has shown to predict teacher job satisfaction and retention. Like our existing survey, teachers’ responses are anonymous and school leaders will be confidentially provided with the results.

The research is in its second phase so on staff completing this (approximately 5 minutes) leaders will have both a detailed report of responses for their school plans and a scaled indication of how this compares to the schools involved in phase one of the research.

This second phase is open exclusively to schools who are working with TDT and will inform sector wide understanding of how factors of effective working environments function together, helping schools and organisations supporting them to plan approaches to continual school improvement through this lens. 

TDT’s own Culture of Improvement paper recently highlighted the close links between high-quality school working conditions and impact of CPD on pupil outcomes, and by engaging in this questionnaire school leaders will gain a deeper understanding of what it’s like for teachers to work in their school. The thoroughly validated questionnaire gives reliable feedback, providing actionable insights into improving staff retention. 

Following the second phase, schools will be able to compare their original data across a wider set. Data will be completely anonymised before being sent to researchers, so the reports generated will be confidential. The anonymised data from the questionnaire will be used by researchers at UCL Institute of Education to investigate how we can improve teacher retention, so by participating schools are also contributing to large scale research and system-wide improvement.

For more from Dr Sims, you can read his latest blog for TDT ‘Benchmarking the 4 things that matter for teachers’ working environments’ and find the full paper on this work via his education research site.​

It is easy for us to set up and provide you with your unique link, and we recommend carrying this out before the end of term or in September insets. As with all surveys, an important step for avoiding “survey fatigue” is to ensure staff are both aware of how this information will be used and of any changes or key ideas that are built from their input. We are happy to arrange a conversation with you on considerations for this.