School climate refers to the relatively enduring quality of life in a school as it is experienced by the people who work and learn there. Definitions vary, but most include the patterns of relationships among teachers, leaders and pupils, the norms and expectations that guide behaviour, the sense of safety, and the way teaching and learning are organised. The National School Climate Center, for example, describes climate as the quality and character of school life, grounded in how pupils, parents and staff experience it. The concept matters to educational administrators because climate is one of the few school-level conditions that leaders can observe, measure and try to change, and because it has been linked repeatedly to teachers’ attitudes and pupils’ achievement and well-being.
Origins
Systematic research on school climate began with Andrew Halpin and Don Croft, whose study The Organizational Climate of Schools was published by the Midwest Administration Center at the University of Chicago in 1963. Halpin and Croft developed the Organizational Climate Description Questionnaire (OCDQ), which asked teachers to describe the behaviour of their colleagues and their principal. Four subtests described teachers (disengagement, hindrance, esprit and intimacy) and four described the principal (aloofness, production emphasis, thrust and consideration). From these scores the authors identified six climate types, ranged along a continuum from open to closed: open, autonomous, controlled, familiar, paternal and closed.
The OCDQ was used widely for more than two decades. Hoy and Clover (1986) then re-examined the climate construct itself and produced a revised elementary school version. In the revision, hindrance was recast as restrictive principal behaviour, production emphasis became directive behaviour and consideration became supportive behaviour; aloofness was dropped and a new collegial subscale was added for teachers. The six climate types were reduced to four: open, engaged, disengaged and closed. Versions for secondary schools and, later, middle schools followed (Hoy et al., 1991; Hoy et al., 1996).
Hoy and his colleagues also introduced a second lens, organisational health. Their inventories describe a school at three levels, institutional, managerial and technical. In these terms, a healthy school is one that is protected from disruptive outside pressures, has leadership that combines consideration with structure, and has teachers who are committed to teaching and learning.
Main frameworks and dimensions
Three families of frameworks are in common use. The first two come from the Hoy tradition and focus on teachers’ descriptions of adult behaviour. The third, which has grown since the 2000s, treats climate as a broader, multi-informant construct that includes pupils’ and parents’ experiences.
| Framework | Dimensions | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| OCDQ-RE (Hoy & Clover, 1986) | Principal: supportive, directive, restrictive. Teachers: collegial, intimate, disengaged | Openness of principal and teacher behaviour in elementary schools |
| OCDQ-RS (Hoy et al., 1991) | Principal: supportive, directive. Teachers: engaged, frustrated, intimate | Openness in secondary schools |
| Organisational Health Inventory, secondary version (Hoy et al., 1991) | Institutional integrity; consideration, initiating structure, resource support, principal influence; morale, academic emphasis | Health at the institutional, managerial and technical levels |
| Thapa et al. (2013) | Safety, relationships, teaching and learning, institutional environment, school improvement process | Integrative review of the wider research field |
| Wang and Degol (2016) | Academic, community, safety, institutional environment | Climate as experienced by pupils |
| National School Climate Center | Safety; teaching and learning; interpersonal relationships; institutional environment; leadership and efficacy | Fourteen dimensions used for school improvement planning |
The later frameworks overlap a good deal. Safety, relationships, teaching and learning, and the physical and organisational environment appear in nearly all of them. What differs is the respondent (teachers only, or pupils, parents and staff) and the purpose (theory testing, or diagnosis for improvement).
Debates and criticisms
The most persistent debate concerns the boundary between climate and culture. Van Houtte (2005) argued that school effectiveness research often uses the two words loosely. In her account, climate is the broader concept and refers to the shared perceptions of the school environment, while culture refers to the deeper, taken-for-granted assumptions, values and beliefs that members hold; she treats culture as one component within climate. A common shorthand in the literature is that climate describes how a school feels to its members, and culture describes the beliefs that explain why it feels that way. The two are closely related, and studies that measure one often capture part of the other. See Organisational Culture in Schools for the cultural side of the distinction.
A second criticism is conceptual breadth. Thapa et al. (2013) and Wang and Degol (2016) both observed that there is no single agreed definition, and that studies use different dimensions and instruments, which makes findings hard to compare. A third concerns aggregation. Climate is usually treated as a property of the school, but it is measured through individual perceptions; aggregating them is defensible only when members of the same school broadly agree, which researchers do not always test. Finally, most of the evidence is correlational, so it is difficult to say whether a positive climate produces better outcomes or whether successful schools simply feel better to work in.
What the evidence shows
Research across several decades has found consistent associations between climate and outcomes, although the strength of these associations varies with the measure, the outcome and the level of schooling.
- Organisational health and achievement. Hoy and Hannum (1997), studying middle schools, found that dimensions of organisational health were significantly related to pupils’ achievement in reading, writing and mathematics, even after school socioeconomic status was taken into account.
- Openness and authenticity. In developing the middle school version of the OCDQ, Hoy et al. (1996) found that more open climates were related to more authentic behaviour by both teachers and principals.
- Broad reviews. Thapa et al. (2013) organised 206 experimental, correlational and descriptive sources around five dimensions and treated climate as a basis for school improvement, while also criticising the field’s methods. Wang and Degol (2016) reviewed research on climate and pupil outcomes and drew attention to gaps in how the construct is defined and measured.
- Meta-analytic estimates. Demirtaş Zorbaz et al. (2021) synthesised 38 studies published between 2000 and 2020, with a combined sample of 491,312, and found a small positive correlation between school climate and academic achievement (r = .178), with considerable variation between studies.
Taken together, the evidence supports the view that climate is a meaningful school-level condition, but it does not show that improving climate will by itself raise attainment. Associations are strongest for outcomes close to daily school life, such as engagement, safety and teacher attitudes.
Measuring school climate
Instruments in the Hoy tradition ask teachers to rate how often particular behaviours occur. The OCDQ-RE has 42 items and yields six subtests plus indices of teacher and principal openness; the OCDQ-RS has 34 items and five subtests (Hoy et al., 1991). The organisational health inventories have 44 items for secondary schools and 37 for elementary schools. Scores are normally aggregated to the school level, so a study needs enough schools, not only enough teachers, for school-level analysis.
Multi-informant surveys, such as those promoted by the National School Climate Center, collect data from pupils, parents and staff. They suit improvement planning, while the Hoy instruments remain common in research on leadership and teacher behaviour. Whichever tool is used, researchers should report how they justified aggregation and should check that translated versions have been validated in the target context.
Evidence from Turkish Research
School climate is one of the most frequently studied topics in Turkish educational administration, in postgraduate theses as well as journal articles. Many studies use Turkish adaptations of the Hoy instruments, and the volume of work has made Turkey one of the few national contexts with its own climate meta-analyses.
- Karadağ, İşçi, Öztekin and Anar (2016), in İnönü Üniversitesi Eğitim Fakültesi Dergisi, meta-analysed 62 studies with 81,233 participants and reported a medium positive correlation between school climate and academic achievement (r = .36). Of the moderators tested, only publication year was significant.
- Sönmez and Sezgin (2017), in Pegem Eğitim ve Öğretim Dergisi, synthesised 30 Turkish studies of teachers’ climate perceptions. Gender and subject area had little or no influence on most climate dimensions, and the significant differences that did appear were small.
- Demirtaş Zorbaz, Akın-Arıkan and Terzi (2021), in School Effectiveness and School Improvement, conducted a multilevel meta-analysis of 38 studies published between 2000 and 2020 and found a small positive association between climate and achievement (r = .178).
For related Turkish evidence on leadership and the conditions it creates, see the distributed leadership meta-analysis digest, which reports links between distributed leadership and trust, culture and climate.
Related concepts
- Organisational culture: the shared assumptions and values that underlie the climate members perceive.
- Organisational trust: teachers’ confidence in the principal, colleagues, pupils and parents; often studied alongside climate.
- Organisational health: Hoy’s alternative lens on climate, focused on institutional, managerial and technical functioning.
- Instructional leadership: principal behaviour that shapes the academic emphasis of a school’s climate.
- Teacher burnout: a teacher outcome often studied in relation to collegial and leadership climate.
Key takeaways
- School climate is the relatively enduring quality of school life as staff and pupils experience it.
- The OCDQ and its revisions describe climate through the openness of principal and teacher behaviour; the health inventories add institutional, managerial and technical levels.
- Climate and culture overlap; climate refers mainly to shared perceptions, culture to underlying assumptions and values.
- Climate is consistently associated with achievement and other outcomes, but the evidence is largely correlational and effect sizes vary.
References
- Demirtaş Zorbaz, S., Akın-Arıkan, Ç., & Terzi, R. (2021). Does school climate that includes students’ views deliver academic achievement? A multilevel meta-analysis. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 32, 543–563. https://doi.org/10.1080/09243453.2021.1920432
- Halpin, A. W., & Croft, D. B. (1963). The organizational climate of schools. Midwest Administration Center, University of Chicago.
- Hoy, W. K., & Clover, S. I. R. (1986). Elementary school climate: A revision of the OCDQ. Educational Administration Quarterly, 22(1), 93–110. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X86022001007
- Hoy, W. K., & Hannum, J. W. (1997). Middle school climate: An empirical assessment of organizational health and student achievement. Educational Administration Quarterly, 33(3), 290–311. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X97033003003
- Hoy, W. K., Hoffman, J., Sabo, D., & Bliss, J. (1996). The organizational climate of middle schools: The development and test of the OCDQ-RM. Journal of Educational Administration, 34(1), 41–59. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578239610107156
- Hoy, W. K., Tarter, C. J., & Kottkamp, R. B. (1991). Open schools/healthy schools: Measuring organizational climate. Sage.
- Karadağ, E., İşçi, S., Öztekin, Ö., & Anar, S. (2016). The relationship between school climate and students’ academic achievement: A meta-analysis study. İnönü Üniversitesi Eğitim Fakültesi Dergisi, 17(2), 107–122. https://doi.org/10.17679/iuefd.17294446
- National School Climate Center. (n.d.). What is school climate? https://www.schoolclimate.org/about/our-approach/what-is-school-climate
- Sönmez, E., & Sezgin, F. (2017). A meta-analytic perspective on school climate studies in Turkey: The impact of some demographic variables. Pegem Eğitim ve Öğretim Dergisi, 7, 453–481. https://doi.org/10.14527/pegegog.2017.017
- Thapa, A., Cohen, J., Guffey, S., & Higgins-D’Alessandro, A. (2013). A review of school climate research. Review of Educational Research, 83(3), 357–385. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654313483907
- Van Houtte, M. (2005). Climate or culture? A plea for conceptual clarity in school effectiveness research. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 16(1), 71–89.
- Wang, M.-T., & Degol, J. L. (2016). School climate: A review of the construct, measurement, and impact on student outcomes. Educational Psychology Review, 28(2), 315–352. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-015-9319-1
Last reviewed: October 2026