Why Workforce Sustainability Is a Leadership Challenge
Across Australian education, workforce sustainability has become an urgent concern.
Teacher shortages, staff retention, workload pressures and leadership burnout are increasingly shaping conversations about the future of schools. Much of the response has understandably focused on attracting more people into the profession, filling vacancies and strengthening workforce planning.
These are essential priorities. But they address only part of the challenge.
Workforce sustainability is not solely a recruitment, retention or human resources issue. It is also a leadership challenge.
At the Menzies Leadership Foundation, our work in school leadership has consistently explored what enables leaders and teams to respond effectively to complexity. Through our investment in collaborative leadership, collective efficacy and leadership capability, we have sought to understand how schools can build the conditions for sustained improvement—not through the actions of one individual, but through the capability of the wider leadership environment.
This same perspective is increasingly relevant to the workforce challenge.
The conditions that influence whether people stay, contribute and thrive are created every day through leadership practice: how decisions are made, how pressure is managed, how purpose is communicated, how teams work together and whether people feel trusted, supported and able to influence their environment.
As schools navigate growing complexity, strengthening the workforce will require more than increasing the number of people entering the system. It will require greater attention to the leadership environments they are entering.
Moving beyond a workforce problem
When workforce challenges are viewed primarily through the lens of supply and demand, the solutions can become similarly narrow.
Recruitment campaigns, incentives and workforce data all have an important role. However, bringing people into schools does not necessarily create the conditions that encourage them to remain.
A sustainable workforce depends on the lived experience of working within a school.
Do staff understand the school’s direction and their role within it? Are difficult issues addressed constructively? Do teams have the trust and capability required to work through uncertainty? Are people able to contribute to decisions that affect their work? Do leaders create space for learning, collaboration and professional growth?
These questions take the workforce conversation beyond numbers. They direct attention towards culture, relationships and leadership capability.
They also highlight an important distinction: workforce strategy may identify what needs to change, but leadership determines whether that change can be enacted and sustained.
This reflects a central premise of MLF’s school leadership work: evidence, tools and strategy matter, but they must be supported by the relational and collaborative capability required to translate insight into practice.
Turning insight into action
Schools and education systems have access to increasing amounts of workforce data. This can help identify patterns in staff experience, wellbeing, capability, turnover and future workforce needs.
But insight alone does not create change.
Leaders must be able to interpret that information within the context of their school, engage people in honest conversations and determine what action is both necessary and possible.
This process is rarely straightforward.
School leaders are often required to balance competing demands: responding to immediate staffing pressures while protecting longer-term priorities; supporting individual needs while maintaining collective direction; and making difficult decisions while preserving trust.
These are not simply technical decisions. They require judgement, relational capability and the ability to act ethically under pressure.
Workforce sustainability therefore depends not only on having better data or stronger plans, but on developing leaders who can translate insight into meaningful action.
For MLF, this is an important area of inquiry. It connects the challenge of workforce sustainability with our broader focus on developing future-fit leaders who can make sense of complexity, exercise sound judgement and mobilise collective action.
Leadership cannot rest with one person
The complexity of the workforce challenge also reinforces the limits of leadership models centred on a single individual.
Principals and formal leadership teams carry significant responsibility, but they cannot create sustainable school cultures alone.
Healthy and adaptive schools rely on leadership being exercised throughout the organisation. This means developing the capacity of people at different levels to contribute to decisions, take responsibility, support colleagues and work towards a shared purpose.
It also means investing in the quality of relationships between people.
When teams can communicate openly, navigate disagreement and work through complexity together, they are better placed to respond to pressure without becoming fragmented or overly dependent on individual leaders.
This broader understanding of leadership sits at the heart of MLF’s work in schools. Rather than focusing only on individual capability, we are interested in how leadership capacity is built across teams and how those teams contribute to stronger schools and more resilient systems.
The role of collective efficacy
Collective efficacy—the shared belief that a group can work together to achieve meaningful outcomes—has particular relevance to workforce sustainability.
In schools, this is often discussed in relation to student achievement. But it also matters for the experience of educators and leaders.
When people believe their collective actions can make a difference, they are more likely to engage with challenges, contribute ideas and persist through difficulty.
Collective efficacy does not emerge from optimism alone. It is built through experience: teams working together, seeing progress, learning from setbacks and developing confidence in their shared capacity.
Leadership plays a vital role in creating these experiences.
Leaders can strengthen collective efficacy by establishing a clear purpose, making collaboration meaningful, encouraging professional agency and ensuring that people can see how their contributions connect to broader outcomes.
MLF’s work has explored collective efficacy not simply as a measure of school performance, but as a capability that can strengthen leadership practice, team effectiveness and the capacity of schools to improve over time.
Viewed through this lens, collective efficacy may also become part of the infrastructure needed to support workforce resilience.
Purpose as an anchor
Workforce pressures can easily pull school leaders towards short-term problem-solving.
Vacancies must be filled. Timetables must be managed. Immediate operational challenges demand attention.
Yet sustainable leadership also requires the capacity to remain connected to purpose.
Purpose provides an anchor when decisions are difficult and priorities are competing. It helps leaders and teams understand not only what they are doing, but why it matters.
Importantly, purpose must be more than an organisational statement. It must be expressed through the values, principles and everyday practices that shape decisions and relationships.
This connects with MLF’s wider research into leadership, complexity and applied ethical capability. We are interested in how values and principles underpin purpose, and how leaders enact that purpose through awareness, influence, wisdom, imagination and courage.
These capabilities are particularly important when workforce decisions involve competing needs, limited resources and questions of fairness and responsibility.
Workforce sustainability is therefore not only about efficiency or capacity. It is also about the kind of institutions we want schools to become and the leadership required to build them.
Reframing the challenge
Viewing workforce sustainability through a leadership lens does not replace the need for broader policy, funding and system reform.
Nor does it place responsibility for structural workforce pressures solely on individual school leaders.
Instead, it expands the conversation.
It recognises that sustainable schools require both strong workforce systems and strong leadership environments. It connects workforce insight with the relational, ethical and collaborative capabilities needed to act on it.
For MLF, this framing opens an important next phase in our school leadership work.
It invites us to consider how leadership capability, workforce insight and collective efficacy might work together to strengthen staff experience, organisational resilience and long-term system sustainability.
It also creates a broader set of questions for schools and systems:
How are we preparing leaders to respond to workforce complexity?
What conditions help people remain, grow and contribute?
How can workforce data inform leadership practice rather than sit separately from it?
How do we build leadership capability across teams, rather than concentrating responsibility at the top?
And how might stronger collective efficacy contribute to more resilient schools?
These questions will become increasingly important as education systems respond to continued workforce pressure.
Attracting people into schools remains essential. But the long-term sustainability of the profession will also depend on what happens once they arrive.
Through our school leadership work, MLF will continue to explore how stronger leadership environments, deeper collective capability and clearer shared purpose can help schools not only respond to workforce pressures, but build the foundations for sustained improvement.
Sustainable schools aren’t built through recruitment alone — they’re built through leadership environments where people feel trusted, supported and connected to purpose. As workforce pressures continue to mount across Australian education, the leaders making a real difference are those who can turn insight into action, strengthen collective efficacy and build the conditions for people to stay, contribute and thrive.
At the Menzies Leadership Foundation, this is precisely the kind of leadership we exist to support. Through our ongoing work in school leadership, collective efficacy and leadership capability, we are helping schools move beyond short-term workforce fixes towards sustained, purpose-led improvement. Connect with our Work.
