Trust in schools is usually defined as one party’s willingness to be vulnerable to another, based on confidence that the other party will act with good will, keep its commitments, do its job well, tell the truth and share information. In schools, the parties are the principal, teachers, pupils and parents, and their work depends heavily on one another: teachers rely on leaders for fair decisions and resources, leaders rely on teachers for the quality of instruction, and both rely on pupils and families to cooperate. Trust matters to educational administrators because it appears to lower the costs of change. Where trust is high, people are more willing to try new practices, share problems and accept decisions they did not make; where it is low, even sensible reforms tend to meet suspicion.
Origins
Interest in trust in schools grew from two research programmes in the 1990s. The first, led by Megan Tschannen-Moran and Wayne Hoy, drew on a wide literature in psychology, sociology, economics and organisational studies. Tschannen-Moran and Hoy (1998) set out a conceptual analysis of trust in schools, and their later review (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2000) brought together four decades of theoretical and empirical work, covering how trust is formed, sustained, broken and repaired, and its links with communication, collaboration, climate, collective efficacy and achievement.
The second programme came from Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider at the University of Chicago, who studied schools reorganising under the Chicago School Reform Act of 1988. Their book Trust in Schools (Bryk & Schneider, 2002) combined case studies of 12 elementary schools with longitudinal survey and achievement data, and introduced the concept of relational trust.
Main models
| Model | Core idea | Components |
|---|---|---|
| Five facets of trust (Hoy & Tschannen-Moran, 1999; Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2000) | Trust is a willingness to be vulnerable, based on confidence in another party | Benevolence, reliability, competence, honesty, openness |
| Faculty trust referents (Hoy & Tschannen-Moran, 2003) | Teachers’ trust differs according to whom it is directed at | Trust in the principal, in colleagues, and in clients (pupils and parents) |
| Relational trust (Bryk & Schneider, 2002, 2003) | Trust rests on how people judge one another’s conduct in their role relationships | Respect, personal regard, competence in core role responsibilities, personal integrity |
In the five-facet model, benevolence is confidence that the other party will protect one’s interests; reliability is the expectation that the other will act consistently and follow through; competence is the ability to perform a task to an appropriate standard; honesty refers to integrity, truthfulness and keeping promises; and openness is the willingness to share information and influence. Vulnerability is the condition that makes trust necessary: without interdependence, there is nothing to trust anyone with. Hoy and Tschannen-Moran (1999) tested this definition in urban elementary schools and found empirical support for it at different organisational levels.
Bryk and Schneider’s model is more sociological. Each member of a school community holds expectations about the obligations of others, and relational trust grows when those expectations are met. Teachers judge whether their views are heard and taken into account (respect), whether others go beyond formal duties to show care (personal regard), whether colleagues and leaders do their jobs well (competence), and whether people keep their word and keep pupils’ welfare at the centre of decisions (integrity). The two models overlap considerably, with competence and integrity or honesty common to both.
Debates and criticisms
A first debate is about the level of analysis. Trust is a relationship between people, yet most school studies aggregate teachers’ responses into a school-level score of faculty trust. This is defensible when teachers in the same school broadly agree, but it can hide sharp differences between groups within a staff.
A second concerns causal direction. Trust is associated with collaboration, efficacy and achievement, but it is also likely to be a result of them: staff who succeed together have reason to trust one another. Most studies are cross-sectional, which leaves the direction open. Bryk and Schneider’s longitudinal design is one of the stronger exceptions, but it was still observational.
A third point concerns culture. Facets such as openness and benevolence were defined largely in North American research. Whether teachers in more hierarchical or collectivist systems weigh them in the same way is an empirical question, which is one reason why validation studies outside the United States matter.
What the evidence shows
- Trust and school improvement. In the Chicago research, which drew on longitudinal analysis of more than 400 elementary schools, schools with low relational trust at the end of the period had roughly a one-in-seven chance of being in the improving group, while half of the high-trust schools were improving. Schools with persistently weak trust had virtually no chance of improving in reading or mathematics (Bryk & Schneider, 2003).
- Trust in pupils and parents and achievement. Goddard, Tschannen-Moran and Hoy (2001) found in a multilevel study of urban elementary schools that teachers’ trust in pupils and parents positively predicted differences in achievement between schools, after taking account of pupil demographics, prior achievement and school socioeconomic status.
- Trust as a mediator of disadvantage. In a statewide random sample of Michigan elementary schools, Goddard, Salloum and Berebitsky (2009) found that higher trust was associated with higher mathematics and reading achievement, and that school poverty and racial composition were related to achievement indirectly, through trust.
- Academic optimism. Hoy, Tarter and Hoy (2006) combined collective efficacy, faculty trust in pupils and parents, and academic emphasis into a single school property, academic optimism. In 96 high schools, academic optimism predicted achievement after controls for socioeconomic status, previous achievement and urbanicity.
The research thus places trust close to collective efficacy. Both describe teachers’ shared expectations, one about other people’s conduct and the other about the group’s capacity to teach well, and the academic optimism research treats them as parts of a single school property rather than as separate conditions.
Measuring organisational trust
The most widely used instrument is the Omnibus T-Scale (Hoy & Tschannen-Moran, 2003). It has 26 items answered on a six-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree, with no neutral point. Eight items measure faculty trust in the principal, eight measure trust in colleagues and ten measure trust in clients, meaning pupils and parents. Several items are reverse-scored. The scale is designed as a school-level measure, so responses are averaged across the staff of each school.
Bryk and Schneider’s relational trust was measured through surveys tied to the role relationships of the Chicago schools they studied. Researchers working outside the United States usually rely on translated versions of the Omnibus T-Scale, and should check that the three-factor structure holds in their own sample.
Evidence from Turkish Research
Organisational trust is a well-established topic in Turkish educational administration, and the Omnibus T-Scale has been used in Turkish since the mid-2000s. More recent studies by Turkey-based researchers have placed trust inside models of instructional leadership, collaboration and teacher efficacy, often with large national samples.
- Özer, Demirtaş, Üstüner and Cömert (2006), in Ege Eğitim Dergisi, used a Turkish adaptation of the Omnibus T-Scale with 236 secondary school teachers in Malatya. Teachers reported moderate levels of trust; trust in colleagues was lower in schools with larger staffs, and teachers in Anatolian and science high schools reported more positive trust than those in other high schools.
- Karacabey, Bellibaş and Adams (2022), in Educational Studies, surveyed 1,200 teachers in Turkey and found that the relationships between principals’ instructional and transformational leadership and teachers’ professional learning were mediated by teacher trust and collective teacher efficacy.
- Çoban, Özdemir and Bellibaş (2023), in Educational Management Administration & Leadership, studied 614 teachers in 45 lower secondary schools across Turkey. Trust in the principal was strongly related to principals’ focus on instruction (β = .86), which in turn was related to teacher collaboration and self-efficacy. The authors note that the cross-sectional design does not establish causal direction.
These findings fit closely with the digest on instructional leadership and teacher work engagement, where collaboration and self-efficacy also link leadership to teacher outcomes.
Related concepts
- School climate: the broader quality of school life, of which trust is often treated as a part.
- Organisational culture: shared values and assumptions that shape whether trust is extended or withheld.
- Collective teacher efficacy: teachers’ shared belief that the staff as a whole can teach pupils successfully; closely linked to faculty trust.
- Academic optimism: a school property combining collective efficacy, trust in pupils and parents, and academic emphasis.
- Instructional leadership: principal behaviour whose influence on teachers appears to depend partly on trust.
- Distributed leadership: sharing leadership among staff, which both requires and can build trust.
Key takeaways
- Trust is a willingness to be vulnerable, based on confidence in another party’s benevolence, reliability, competence, honesty and openness.
- Bryk and Schneider’s relational trust rests on respect, personal regard, competence and integrity in everyday role relationships.
- The Omnibus T-Scale measures faculty trust in the principal, in colleagues and in pupils and parents.
- Trust is consistently associated with school improvement, achievement and collective efficacy, although most studies cannot establish the direction of influence.
References
- Bryk, A. S., & Schneider, B. (2002). Trust in schools: A core resource for improvement. Russell Sage Foundation.
- Bryk, A. S., & Schneider, B. (2003). Trust in schools: A core resource for school reform. Educational Leadership, 60(6), 40–45.
- Çoban, Ö., Özdemir, N., & Bellibaş, M. Ş. (2023). Trust in principals, leaders’ focus on instruction, teacher collaboration, and teacher self-efficacy: Testing a multilevel mediation model. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 51(1), 95–115. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741143220968170
- Goddard, R. D., Salloum, S. J., & Berebitsky, D. (2009). Trust as a mediator of the relationships between poverty, racial composition, and academic achievement: Evidence from Michigan’s public elementary schools. Educational Administration Quarterly, 45(2), 292–311. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X08330503
- Goddard, R. D., Tschannen-Moran, M., & Hoy, W. K. (2001). A multilevel examination of the distribution and effects of teacher trust in students and parents in urban elementary schools. Elementary School Journal, 102(1), 3–17.
- Hoy, W. K., Tarter, C. J., & Hoy, A. W. (2006). Academic optimism of schools: A force for student achievement. American Educational Research Journal, 43(3), 425–446. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312043003425
- Hoy, W. K., & Tschannen-Moran, M. (1999). Five faces of trust: An empirical confirmation in urban elementary schools. Journal of School Leadership, 9(3), 184–208. https://doi.org/10.1177/105268469900900301
- Hoy, W. K., & Tschannen-Moran, M. (2003). The conceptualization and measurement of faculty trust in schools: The Omnibus T-Scale. In W. K. Hoy & C. G. Miskel (Eds.), Studies in leading and organizing schools (pp. 181–208). Information Age Publishing.
- Karacabey, M. F., Bellibaş, M. Ş., & Adams, D. (2022). Principal leadership and teacher professional learning in Turkish schools: Examining the mediating effects of collective teacher efficacy and teacher trust. Educational Studies, 48(2), 253–272. https://doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2020.1749835
- Özer, N., Demirtaş, H., Üstüner, M., & Cömert, M. (2006). Ortaöğretim öğretmenlerinin örgütsel güven algıları [Secondary school teachers’ perceptions of organisational trust]. Ege Eğitim Dergisi, 7(1), 103–124.
- Tschannen-Moran, M., & Hoy, W. K. (1998). Trust in schools: A conceptual and empirical analysis. Journal of Educational Administration, 36(4), 334–352. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578239810211518
- Tschannen-Moran, M., & Hoy, W. K. (2000). A multidisciplinary analysis of the nature, meaning, and measurement of trust. Review of Educational Research, 70(4), 547–593. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543070004547
Last reviewed: October 2026