Organisational culture in schools refers to the shared and largely taken-for-granted assumptions, values, norms and symbols that shape how teachers, leaders and pupils think, feel and act. It is often summarised as “the way we do things around here”. Culture matters because it filters every attempt at change: a new policy, curriculum or leadership model is interpreted through existing beliefs about teaching, authority and colleagues, and a reform that clashes with those beliefs is likely to be resisted or quietly absorbed. For this reason, writers on school leadership have long treated the reading and shaping of culture as a central part of the principal’s work.
Origins
The concept came into educational administration from organisational studies and anthropology in the late 1970s and 1980s. The most influential framework was Edgar Schein’s, now in its fifth edition (Schein & Schein, 2017). Schein defined culture as the pattern of basic assumptions that a group has learned while solving its problems of adapting to its environment and holding itself together, and that has worked well enough to be taught to newcomers as the correct way to perceive and act. He distinguished three levels:
- Artefacts: the visible features of a group, such as buildings, dress, ceremonies, routines and the language people use. They are easy to observe but hard to interpret.
- Espoused beliefs and values: the stated goals, philosophies and justifications, such as a school’s mission statement or its declared commitment to every pupil’s success.
- Basic underlying assumptions: unconscious, taken-for-granted beliefs about people, learning and authority. For Schein these are the essence of culture, and where they conflict with espoused values, the assumptions usually win.
In education, Deal and Peterson (2016, first published 1999) brought the concept to a wide audience of school leaders. They described culture through its values, norms, rituals, ceremonies, stories and symbols, and argued that improvement must come from within schools as well as from external mandates. They also described “toxic” cultures, marked by negativity, cliques, little collaboration and a lack of common purpose, and used metaphors such as historian, anthropological sleuth, visionary and healer for the roles that principals, and other staff, can take in reading and reshaping what lies beneath daily routine.
Forms of teacher culture
Andy Hargreaves shifted attention from the school as a whole to the working relationships among teachers. Building on his earlier study of peer coaching (Hargreaves & Dawe, 1990), he identified four broad forms of teacher culture in Changing Teachers, Changing Times (Hargreaves, 1994).
| Form | Main features | Typical risk |
|---|---|---|
| Individualism | Teachers work in isolation in their own classrooms; little feedback or joint planning | Safety and autonomy, but limited professional learning |
| Balkanisation | Teachers belong to separate, fairly permanent sub-groups, often by subject or department, with stronger loyalty to the group than to the school | Competition for resources and weak whole-school coherence |
| Contrived collegiality | Collaboration is required, scheduled and regulated by administrators, often to implement decisions made elsewhere | Compliance without commitment; can suppress teacher initiative |
| Collaborative culture | Relationships are voluntary, development-oriented and based on trust and mutual support | Can become comfortable and avoid hard questions about practice |
Hargreaves did not claim that collaboration is always good. In a later review of three decades of research he noted that collaboration can be too comfortable, avoiding critical dialogue, or too contrived, serving administrative control, and he argued for “collaborative professionalism”, which combines structured joint work with informal trust (Hargreaves, 2019).
Culture and climate
Culture is frequently confused with school climate. Hoy (1990) offered an early conceptual analysis of the two terms as applied to the school workplace. Van Houtte (2005) later argued that school effectiveness research had used them almost interchangeably. In her account, climate has its roots in organisational psychology and refers to members’ shared perceptions of the school’s enduring characteristics, while culture comes from anthropology and sociology and refers to shared assumptions, values and beliefs. Climate is therefore the broader and more descriptive concept, and culture is one component of it. She recommended that researchers state clearly which of the two they are measuring and test whether perceptions or beliefs are actually shared before aggregating them to the school level.
Debates and criticisms
The concept is attractive but slippery. Culture is defined so broadly that almost any school feature can be included, and many studies label a set of survey scales “culture” without showing that the items capture shared assumptions rather than individual perceptions (Van Houtte, 2005). A second concern is managerialism: practitioner texts sometimes imply that principals can engineer culture, whereas Schein’s own account treats deep assumptions as slow to change and only partly open to leaders’ influence. Third, the strong emphasis on collegiality can conceal power relations. Hargreaves’ notion of contrived collegiality shows how collaboration can be used to secure compliance rather than to develop teachers’ judgement.
What the evidence shows
Research on school culture is mostly correlational, and causal claims should be treated with caution. Little (1982) found that norms of collegiality and experimentation were among the workplace conditions of more successful schools. Gruenert (2005) collected culture data from teachers in 81 Indiana schools and correlated scores on the six factors of the School Culture Survey with student achievement; several of the culture factors were significantly related to achievement in mathematics and language arts. One of the larger studies of collaboration is that of Ronfeldt et al. (2015), who drew on survey and administrative data from more than 9,000 teachers in 336 Miami-Dade schools. Higher-quality collaboration in instructional teams was associated with greater achievement gains in mathematics and reading, and teachers improved faster in schools with better collaboration.
These findings fit the broader conclusion of Hargreaves (2019) that collaborative cultures are generally associated with better pupil achievement and with teachers’ self-efficacy and job satisfaction, provided that collaboration focuses on practice rather than on friendliness alone. Studies of distributed and instructional leadership reach a similar point from a different direction: the effect of leadership on teachers appears to run partly through the collaborative culture of the school (see the meta-analysis of distributed leadership and the study of instructional leadership and work engagement).
Measuring school culture
Culture can be studied qualitatively, through observation, interviews and analysis of artefacts and stories, which is closest to Schein’s own approach. Quantitative research usually relies on teacher questionnaires. The most widely cited is the School Culture Survey developed by Gruenert and Valentine (1998) at the Middle Level Leadership Center, University of Missouri. It measures six factors: collaborative leadership, teacher collaboration, professional development, collegial support, unity of purpose and learning partnership. Because the instrument asks about collaborative practices, critics note that it measures one kind of culture, a collaborative one, rather than culture in Schein’s broader sense. Turkish researchers have used both adapted international instruments and locally developed school culture scales.
Evidence from Turkish Research
Turkish schools operate in a centralised system in which the Ministry of National Education decides much of the curriculum, staffing and budget, so school culture is one of the few areas in which principals and teachers have real room to act. School culture has been studied extensively in Turkey, usually through surveys linking it to leadership, organisational health, cynicism or achievement, with a smaller number of qualitative case studies.
- Turan and Bektaş (2013), Eurasian Journal of Educational Research: in a survey of 349 primary school teachers in 15 schools in Erzurum, principals’ leadership practices were positively related to school culture, with correlations between .45 and .51; five leadership dimensions together explained 28% of the variance in culture scores.
- Karadağ, Kılıçoğlu and Yılmaz (2014), Educational Sciences: Theory & Practice: using data from 291 teachers in 15 primary schools in Eskişehir, stratified by socio-economic area, they found through structural equation modelling that teachers’ organisational cynicism was negatively associated with school culture, and that school culture was positively associated with schools’ placement test results.
- Kayıkçı, Engür and Bektaş Altıok (2023), E-International Journal of Educational Research: a qualitative case study of two lower secondary schools in Antalya with low examination results. Staff described supportive relationships, solidarity and participation in decisions, but also weak attention to academic achievement, rule-following to avoid mistakes and limited staff development, a pattern that suggests a warm but not learning-focused culture.
Related concepts
- School climate: teachers’ and pupils’ shared perceptions of the school environment; broader and more descriptive than culture.
- Distributed leadership: leadership spread across many people, closely tied to collaborative culture.
- Instructional leadership: leadership focused on teaching and learning, often studied alongside school culture.
- Professional learning communities: structured groups of teachers who examine practice and pupil learning together.
- Organisational trust: a condition for, and outcome of, a collaborative culture.
Key takeaways
- School culture consists of shared assumptions, values, norms and symbols; Schein’s deepest level, basic assumptions, is the hardest to see and to change.
- Hargreaves’ four forms of teacher culture show that collaboration can be genuine or contrived, and that balkanisation and isolation limit whole-school change.
- Culture and climate are related but distinct; researchers should say which they are measuring and check that responses are shared.
- Collaborative cultures are consistently associated with better teacher and pupil outcomes, but most of the evidence is correlational.
References
- Deal, T. E., & Peterson, K. D. (2016). Shaping school culture (3rd ed.). Jossey-Bass.
- Gruenert, S. (2005). Correlations of collaborative school cultures with student achievement. NASSP Bulletin, 89(645), 43–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/019263650508964504
- Gruenert, S., & Valentine, J. (1998). School Culture Survey [Measurement instrument]. Middle Level Leadership Center, University of Missouri-Columbia.
- Hargreaves, A. (1994). Changing teachers, changing times: Teachers’ work and culture in the postmodern age. Cassell.
- Hargreaves, A. (2019). Teacher collaboration: 30 years of research on its nature, forms, limitations and effects. Teachers and Teaching, 25(5), 603–621. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2019.1639499
- Hargreaves, A., & Dawe, R. (1990). Paths of professional development: Contrived collegiality, collaborative culture, and the case of peer coaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 6(3), 227–241.
- Hoy, W. K. (1990). Organizational climate and culture: A conceptual analysis of the school workplace. Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation, 1(2), 149–168. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532768xjepc0102_4
- Karadağ, E., Kılıçoğlu, G., & Yılmaz, D. (2014). Organizational cynicism, school culture, and academic achievement: The study of structural equation modeling. Educational Sciences: Theory & Practice, 14(1), 102–113. https://doi.org/10.12738/estp.2014.1.1640
- Kayıkçı, K., Engür, A., & Bektaş Altıok, G. R. (2023). Başarı seviyesi düşük okullarda okul kültürünün incelenmesi [Examining school culture in schools with low achievement levels]. E-Uluslararası Eğitim Araştırmaları Dergisi, 14(6), 20–39. https://doi.org/10.19160/e-ijer.1285088
- Little, J. W. (1982). Norms of collegiality and experimentation: Workplace conditions of school success. American Educational Research Journal, 19(3), 325–340. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312019003325
- Ronfeldt, M., Farmer, S. O., McQueen, K., & Grissom, J. A. (2015). Teacher collaboration in instructional teams and student achievement. American Educational Research Journal, 52(3), 475–514. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831215585562
- Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. (2017). Organizational culture and leadership (5th ed.). Wiley.
- Turan, S., & Bektaş, F. (2013). The relationship between school culture and leadership practices. Eurasian Journal of Educational Research, 52, 155–168.
- 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. https://doi.org/10.1080/09243450500113977
Last reviewed: October 2026