School Staff Culture: Knowledge-building, Reflection and Action

A powerful school culture can unite staff in a common vision, shape positive behaviours and attitudes, and create the conditions for the staff body to work as one. As the recruitment and retention crisis deepens, staff culture is more important than ever. This book explores how schools can develop a culture where individuals take pride in their work and actively seek and embrace development and challenge, seeing the big picture of the school and cherishing their role in it.

Drawing on key ideas from systems theory, psychology, anthropology, business and philosophy, this book explores the key ideas we need in order to understand culture and the concrete steps we can take in order to intentionally develop our staff culture in a positive direction. Each chapter features powerful input to strengthen our understanding alongside probing reflections to guide our own development.

Written by a leading practitioner and designed to support reflections and planning for concrete actions, this is essential reading for school leaders and head teachers wanting to develop an authentic, powerful and positive school staff culture.

School Staff Culture benefits from a completely free school development package, with session plans, slides and resources to structure a programme of sessions for leadership and specialist culture teams. The package supports the input, reflection, discussion, evaluation and contextualised application and review that will really bring the ideas in School Staff Culture to life in a school, and can be downloaded from www.routledge.com/9781032121963.

Ruth Ashbee is a teacher, senior leader and blogger, and has worked in state comprehensives since qualifying as a teacher of physics in 2005. Specialising in curriculum, teacher development and school improvement, her interests include philosophy, the professionalisation of teaching and the destruction of ivory towers.