What is it to feel valued as a professional?

What do teachers, leaders, and teaching assistants need to feel valued as professionals? And how can answering this question help ensure that schools are inspiring, supportive places to work every day?

For the past eight years, I’ve been gathering feedback from two main sources to explore this question. First, I’ve worked with over a thousand school leaders across the UK through professional learning programmes. Second, I’ve surveyed more than 3,200 school staff across 600 teams using anonymous questionnaires. The results are both fascinating and important, especially given the challenges schools face with recruitment and retention. They offer valuable insights into what makes schools great workplaces.

This post highlights key themes from my findings, along with reflection questions to encourage further discussion. Future posts will explore each theme in greater depth.

Mission

‘We aren’t in the business of making toilet rolls, our school and the education it provides, can really enhance the life chances of children who live in significant deprivation.’

School leader

A key theme that runs through the results, is that staff feel valued as professionals where there is a clear, compelling mission around which the school/college is aligned.

For those who have worked with me before, you may recall me talking about ‘cathedral building’. The sense that working collaboratively, we can build something that inspires our children/young people, our communities, and each other in terms of its’ impact. An energising mission that is centred upon possibilities, growth and inspiring potential, rather than problems, gaps, and overbearing accountability.

When it’s more than just words on a website, it guides decision-making and fosters deep collaboration in daily practice.

Shared Clarity

Shared clarity builds security, and security builds trust

Anon

Shared clarity benefits schools in two key ways:

1. It strengthens professional trust and collaboration. Staff feel valued when they participate in discussions that define high performance and expectations.
2. It reduces confusion and cognitive overload. A lack of shared clarity often correlates with ineffective feedback and staff feeling overwhelmed.

Teachers and leaders consistently highlight the importance of open dialogue in shaping a shared understanding of expectations. They want to know what they are accountable for, why it matters, and how they can achieve excellence. Without this clarity, feedback loses impact, and staff are left unsure of their progress. Therefore high levels of clarity of all forms of communication are particularly important in the busy environment of schools.

Feedback

‘Others noticing and recognising my growth has been invaluable in helping me to overcome the imposter syndrome that, in previous roles, had really acted a drag on my confidence’

Middle leader

One of the benefits of AI is that is great a crunching large amounts of data. Given that the survey contained 25 different questions and we had more than 3,200 responses, I was keen to explore the correlation in results of different questions in the survey. One of the strongest areas of correlation was linked to feedback. Data analysis from my survey (which included 25 questions and over 3,200 responses) revealed a strong correlation between feeling valued and the quality of feedback. Key findings include:

1. The importance of recognition and praise for their efforts, as well as for growth. As we would with children/young people, recognising the good work of people in teams and individuals growth and development is incredibly important. Where feedback relentlessly focusses on gaps, rather than acknowledging the growth that has taken place, is likely to lead staff to feel undervalued.
2. The importance of timely feedback. For adults, just like children/young people, the timeliness of the feedback plays a key role in whether they feel that the feedback is of worth, and therefore, by implication they feel that they are of worth.
3. Clarity enhances development. When feedback focuses on too many areas, it becomes overwhelming. A targeted approach makes progress feel achievable.
4. The extent to which truthful feedback is a two-way street. Feeling listened to is key to professional regard. Staff cite the importance of having the psychological safe space to voice their concerns, ask questions, seek clarity, or make suggestions without the fear that the feedback might be misinterpreted as criticism.
5. Having a shared understanding of the meaning of the word ‘feedback’ and the process that underpins it. Many teachers in low-trust teams fear feedback or perceive it to be criticism in disguise rather than useful information on how to develop further.

Systems and processes

‘The problem in this school is that I feel like we’re all drowning in information overload. I must have received fifty emails today, on top of a full teaching timetable.’

Frustrated teacher

THE most consistent and important message from all the findings I’ve collated, is that a lack of time is the biggest barrier in school. It’s scarcity leads to many to cite feeling overwhelmed with workload, and find mistake-making is more common due to the sheer amount of multi-tasking taking place.

This is where systems and processes can either mitigate or exacerbate the problem. Where systems and processes are inefficient, confusing, or generate ‘problem work’ they add to workload. ‘Problem work’ is the work that needs to be done, on top of the heavy day-to-day workload, to ‘fix’ or deal with the consequences of ineffective systems/processes. Some of the processes I’ve observed in schools which can be most vulnerable to creating problem work include:

• Teaching frameworks that lack consistency
• Unclear or ineffective feedback systems
• Excessive or poorly structured email communication
• Overloaded meeting schedules
• CPD sessions that lack relevance or coherence
• Administrative burdens that detract from teaching

Time is in short supply in schools. Therefore, albeit for even the most seemingly boring and mundane processes, the more that systems/processes can be streamlined and designed to work efficiently for the benefit of all stakeholders, then this frees up time that can be directed to more purposeful matters. Schools demonstrate respect for their staff by eliminating unnecessary workload and ensuring that systems support—rather than hinder—effective teaching and leadership.

Opportunities for Greater Agency

Autonomy in schools can be risky, leading to inconsistencies across classrooms and limiting collaboration. Instead, a balance of agency within a shared framework creates the best outcomes. Staff feel valued when they have opportunities to:

• Lead projects
• Develop schemes of learning
• Research and implement new strategies

Having agency to lead were key markers in the findings where staff feel valued as professionals. In contrast, micromanagement repeatedly emerges as a red flag for feeling undervalued. Giving educators space to innovate within a structured framework fosters motivation and professional growth.

Working environment

Some of the elements that underpin feeling valued as a professional under this heading can often go totally unnoticed by teachers/leaders. Often, we only notice aspects of the working environment when they aren’t right—like a stone in a shoe.

These include sufficient resourcing. Resourcing such as appropriate room size/dimensions, temperature, availability and reliability of technology e.g. wifi, visualiser, etc, to factors such as quiet spaces to work when planning/collaborating, and comfortable rest areas. Whilst all these were popular comments from those surveyed, if there was one factor, above all others, that is consistently cited as the most important, it is having a calm and safe environment to teach.  Not just for the impact disruption has on the ability to teach, the time in lessons wasted, but also of the associated ‘problem work’ that comes with resolving the issues in the moment, and following up afterwards.

Professional Development

‘There’s only one thing worse than no CPD, it’s bad CPD’

Anonymous teacher

High-quality professional learning deepens knowledge, supports growth, and sustains long-term improvement. The best professional learning:

• Is thoughtfully designed and sequenced (just like a good curriculum)
• Uses cognitive science principles to enhance learning
• Meets individual and team development needs

However not all CPD in schools, according to the findings, has this impact. Many cite the frustration of the opportunity cost of ineffective CPD, the loss of the time to do other things. This is magnified given that teachers and leaders are time poor. After all, they could be getting on with working through their to-do-list instead!

A key test of whether staff feel valued is the quality of the CPD provided for them. CPD for staff needs to be designed and sequenced in the same careful way as curriculum for children and young people. In addition, the principles of cognitive science apply to adults too!

Curriculum

‘You can’t out teach a bad curriculum, however good a teacher you are’

Anonymous Science teacher

Curriculum has been a burning issue in many of the school systems that I have been working in, in recent years. One interesting link with professional regard that my findings have picked out, is the impact of having a well-sequenced, curriculum that is not overloaded.  

Where the curriculum is too packed, teachers find themselves using verbs such as ‘cover’ and ‘deliver’ rather than teaching and learning. Teachers share their fears that the packed nature of the curriculum and the pace that it needs to be taught is inhibiting their ability to fully adapt lesson sequences to meet the needs of their learners. Not only this, but there are fewer opportunities to slow down and push children’s/young people’s learning deeper, with the consequent impact on their ability to remember what is being taught, as well as the missed opportunities for mastery experiences for them. 

Where curriculum is well-sequenced, provides opportunities to move learning from surface to deep, teachers are able to teach so that learners’ experience competence with the consequent impact this has on learner motivation.

Reflection Questions

• Which of these themes are strengths in your school? Which areas need improvement?
• How does your school’s approach to these areas impact staff feeling valued as professionals?
• What small changes could make a big difference in your team’s daily experience?