Welcome to the 2024 PeopleBench State of the Sector report. Now in its fifth year of providing compelling insights on school workforces across Australia, the 2024 State of the Sector report takes a deep dive into the perspective of school leaders—their experience of leading in this climate and their plans for the future of their school’s workforce. Download the report here.
Our results continue to show the workforce challenges facing schools are critical, and vary depending on school context. The PeopleBench team of school workforce experts can help you find the right solution for your context and build your best Education workforce.
Most Education leaders understand the benefits of developing a Workforce Strategy, and an increasing proportion of governance bodies expect one. The PeopleBench Workforce Strategy BuilderTM helps you create an evidence-informed strategy document in hours, not weeks or months, removing the guesswork and significantly reducing the costs.
Creating the workforce culture you want begins with properly understanding the culture you currently have. As our results show, it can be difficult to see how culture manifests ‘on the ground’. The PeopleBench Workforce Culture Tracker™ helps you measure, manage, and monitor how employees experience your culture; whether it’s fit-for-purpose; and where you should prioritise your efforts to change or maintain your culture.
The State of the Sector survey was distributed to Australian School Leaders (Principals, other Senior Leaders, Middle Leaders), Teachers, and Business/HR Managers via direct email, social media, and industry media campaigns. As a recruitment incentive, an Apple Watch was offered to a randomly-selected participant.
A total of 521 participants responded to the survey in May–June 2022.
The survey included a total of 51 questions. Respondents were asked to nominate which of the above role types best described their current role; their response determined which questions they would complete. All questions were presented to Principals and Other Senior School Leaders; a subset of questions was presented to other respondents.
Of the 521 total respondents, 20 were excluded from analysis because they completed only a small handful of questions, leaving a sample of 501 for analysis and reporting.
For most questions, responses were analysed in five ways: as a ‘whole sample’; separated by school type (Primary, Secondary, and Combined Years – e.g., K/P–12); separated by school sector (Government schools/Catholic schools/Independent schools); by geography (e.g. major cities; regional; remote) and by the five role types mentioned above.
Like all observational survey-based research, sampling bias may limit the generalisation of results. For example, participants may have completed the survey because they have front-of-mind concerns about the school workforce, because they’re familiar with/supportive of PeopleBench’s work, or because they have a special interest in human resources. The sample therefore may not fully reflect the breadth of perspectives in the Education sector.
It is also important to note that this is not longitudinal research; we have not ‘followed’ the same cohort of respondents from year to year. Each year, our survey sample will be a little different, and this may explain some of the differences in results over time.
PeopleBench is an Education sector workforce improvement company. We build software tools and provide advisory services and research to help Education leaders make schools great places to work, so they can be great places to learn.
The State of the Sector project forms part of our suite of research initiatives into what makes an effective and impactful school workforce.
We want to understand how leaders and policy-makers in the sector can use data to make smarter workforce decisions and build better school workforces.
If you’re interested in learning more about us or joining us on this quest, please visit
The PeopleBench Workforce Resilience Tracker™ helps you measure, manage, and monitor how your people are travelling using a brief, psychometrically-validated assessment of resilience — sustainable wellbeing + sustainable performance — at work.
The charts below illustrate, for each statement, respondents’ level of agreement when thinking about the workforce today (left) and their sentiment in three years’ time (right). They show, for example, of the respondents who indicated agreement with the statement “When I think about the school workforce today, I feel excited”, how many also agreed with the statement “When I think about the school workforce three years from now, I feel excited.”
