This is the first in a series of blogs from Teacher Tapp and the Chartered College of Teaching exploring belonging in schools. Each piece brings together fresh data on teachers’ experiences with the wider research evidence. Future posts in the series will be written by the Chartered College and shared on both our sites. This first article is written by June Stevenson, Head of School Surveys at Teacher Tapp
If you ask teachers what makes a good school to work in, many will say “the people”. And the data agrees, but only up to a point.
Most teachers have their people
Schools can make for excellent workplaces: not just filled with the energy of youth (sometimes a little too much energy), but also places of great comradeship and fun amongst staff. I have fond memories of the silly pranks we played and sometimes ill-advised singing at staff socials. As well as slightly less fond memories of crying on teacher friends’ shoulders after a bad observation or a hideous parent confrontation.
Friendships in schools are common. In October 2026, 90% of teachers told Teacher Tapp they have good friendships at work, and 81% say they find it easy to build relationships with colleagues. This matters for how individual teachers feel. Among those who find relationships with colleagues “very easy”, 38% describe their own morale as high. Among those who find it “very difficult”, just 7% do. This fits a long line of research treating belonging as a basic human need (Baumeister and Leary, 1995), and studies of teachers in particular. Skaalvik and Skaalvik (2011) found that teachers’ sense of belonging at school was linked to higher job satisfaction and lower motivation to leave the profession. But although collegiality is important, it doesn’t explain why some schools have high morale and others don’t.
Friendship doesn’t lift the whole staffroom
When Teacher Tapp asked teachers how morale is among staff at their school, those with strong work friendships were barely more positive than those without: 20% against 17%. Close bonds can even work the other way. Teacher Tapp asked teachers whether they’d follow their closest colleague if that colleague moved schools and encouraged them to join. Teachers who said “definitely” were more than twice as likely to report low staff morale as those who said “definitely not” (59% against 23%). Where morale is low, friends may simply leave together. Organisational research has found something similar: staff turnover tends to spread through social networks, with people more likely to leave when close colleagues do (Krackhardt and Porter, 1986; Felps et al., 2009).
Part of the explanation may be that friendship and professional collegiality are different things. Hargreaves (1994) distinguished between staffrooms that are simply sociable and genuinely collaborative cultures, where colleagues work together on teaching itself. Research on school working conditions has since found that a strong professional environment, including good leadership and collaboration, helps teachers keep improving (Kraft and Papay, 2014).
What does make the difference
Teacher Tapp data suggests that friendship can lift individual teachers, but only leadership lifts the whole staffroom. In January 2024, where teachers said their school leaders listen and respond to staff concerns “all of the time”, 47% described staff morale as high. Where leaders rarely or never listen, that falls to under 4%. We see the same pattern when we ask whether leaders communicate clearly.
This echoes a consistent finding in the research literature. It’s the leadership of an organisation that makes the biggest difference when it comes to retention. Ladd’s (2011) study of teachers’ working conditions found that perceptions of school leadership were the strongest predictor of teachers’ plans to leave. Kraft, Marinell and Yee (2016) found that improvements in school leadership went alongside lower teacher turnover.
It’s a story we see again and again in the surveys that leaders run in their own schools through School Surveys. Between January 2025 and October 2026, 77 schools asked their staff (3,918 in total) both whether leaders listen and respond to their concerns, and whether their morale had risen over the past year. Where staff said leaders listen all of the time, 68% reported higher morale than a year before. Where leaders listened only a little of the time or never, just 11% did.
Recognition follows the same pattern. In 28 of those schools, which also asked about recognition (2,990 staff), 70% of those who strongly agreed they’re recognised for a job well done said their morale had risen, against 10% of those who strongly disagreed.
And there is another story here too, and it’s the gap that emerges when we compare question responses. Staff are far more likely to feel appreciated by colleagues (77%) than by school leadership (43%). Peers are already giving each other a sense of belonging, so it’s the leaders who are often the missing piece.
The Chartered College’s recent review of the evidence on belonging makes a similar point: a culture of belonging needs to include staff as well as pupils, and staff who feel trusted, valued and supported are better placed to create belonging for the children they teach (O’Brien and Crittenden, 2026).
Listening is only the start
In a smaller sample of around 150 staff, School Surveys asked whether leaders had responded to their last survey, and the answer went closely with morale. Where leaders had made or planned improvements, 82% of those staff said their morale was higher than a year ago. Where leaders had only discussed the results, it was 43%. Where staff hadn’t noticed any response, just 14%.
Schools whose leaders act on survey results are likely to differ in other ways too, so this shows an association, not proof that acting on a survey raises morale. But it fits what we know about employee voice: when people see nothing change after speaking up, they tend to stop speaking up at all (Morrison, 2014), and teams do better where staff feel safe to raise concerns (Edmondson, 1999).
Voices on the ground
Belonging is not just about who you sit with at lunch. It’s about feeling that your view counts. Research on employee voice suggests that being asked matters less than seeing a response: people speak up when they believe it will make a difference, and fall silent when it doesn’t (Morrison, 2014). For school leaders, the question is less, “Do our staff get on?” and more, “Do our staff believe we are listening?”
About the data
Teacher Tapp figures come from our daily survey app, drawn from questions asked between January 2024 and October 2026, each answered by around 10,000 teachers in England, and weighted to reflect the national teaching workforce. School-level figures come from staff surveys run through School Surveys in 745 schools since 2022, with around 125,700 staff responses. All the figures here show associations, not cause and effect.
References
Baumeister RF and Leary MR (1995) The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin 117(3): 497–529.
Edmondson A (1999) Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly 44(2): 350–383.
Felps W, Mitchell TR, Hekman DR et al. (2009) Turnover contagion: How coworkers’ job embeddedness and job search behaviors influence quitting. Academy of Management Journal 52(3): 545–561.
Hargreaves A (1994) Changing Teachers, Changing Times: Teachers’ Work and Culture in the Postmodern Age. London: Cassell.
Kraft MA, Marinell WH and Yee D (2016) School organizational contexts, teacher turnover, and student achievement: Evidence from panel data. American Educational Research Journal 53(5): 1411–1449.
Kraft MA and Papay JP (2014) Can professional environments in schools promote teacher development? Explaining heterogeneity in returns to teaching experience. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 36(4): 476–500.
Krackhardt D and Porter LW (1986) The snowball effect: Turnover embedded in communication networks. Journal of Applied Psychology 71(1): 50–55.
Ladd HF (2011) Teachers’ perceptions of their working conditions: How predictive of planned and actual teacher movement? Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 33(2): 235–261.
Morrison EW (2014) Employee voice and silence. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 1: 173–197.
O’Brien B and Crittenden J (2026) Belonging and wellbeing in schools: Exploring the evidence base. Chartered College of Teaching Research Hub. Available at: https://my.chartered.college/research-hub/belonging-and-wellbeing-in-schools-exploring-the-evidence-base/
Skaalvik EM and Skaalvik S (2011) Teacher job satisfaction and motivation to leave the teaching profession: Relations with school context, feeling of belonging, and emotional exhaustion. Teaching and Teacher Education 27(6): 1029–1038.
