What Makes a School a Great Place to Work? Lessons from Ireland's High-Retention Schools
- Teacher retention is driven by pay and contracts but also by factors schools can directly control: culture, leadership, autonomy, and professional development
- Distributed leadership, manageable workload, and meaningful CPD are key retention factors within school control
- High-retention schools are typically where teachers feel seen, supported, and professionally respected
- Schools with strong cultures also attract substitute teachers who want to return
Some Irish schools hold onto their teachers year after year. Others cycle through new staff year after year. The difference is rarely pay, because pay is set centrally and applies to everyone. The difference is the experience of working there: the culture, the leadership, the small daily signals that tell a teacher whether they are valued.
That experience is not fixed. It is built, maintained, and where it has broken down, rebuilt. And it sits almost entirely within the influence of the people running the school.
Retention is a live issue across Irish education right now. But this article is about what schools can do, not what they cannot. The factors below are things principals and deputy principals can act on, starting this term.
What the Research Shows
The IPPN's Sustainable Leadership Progress Report 2024 identifies the conditions that lead to school leader stress. Their inverse gives a clear picture of what high-functioning school cultures look like: protected time, manageable demands, adequate resources, genuine agency, and meaningful collegial support.
The INTO Research Report on Teacher Workload (2022) found significant variation between schools. Schools that actively managed workload distribution and protected preparation time were described differently by teachers than those that did not.
The Five Factors That Matter Most
1. Quality of school leadership. Teachers who feel trusted and respected by their principal are substantially more likely to stay. Consistent, fair, transparent decision-making and visible awareness of the weight of teachers' work are what this looks like in practice.
2. Distributed leadership. Schools where responsibility is genuinely shared — where subject co-ordinators and year heads carry meaningful authority — retain staff better than those where all decisions flow through the principal.
3. Manageable workload. The principal who says "we will not have meetings after school hours unless genuinely necessary" is making a retention decision. Protecting preparation time and distributing administrative tasks equitably accumulate into culture.
4. Meaningful professional development. The Teaching Council's Cosán framework provides structure for professional learning that is teacher-led and school-contextualised. Schools that protect time for CPD and connect it to school improvement planning retain teachers better.
5. How NQTs experience their first year. The Droichead induction programme implemented with genuine commitment — real mentoring, protected time, meaningful professional conversation — sends NQTs into their second year equipped and supported. The opposite sends them into year two overwhelmed.
What This Has to Do with Substitute Cover
Schools with strong staff retention need fewer substitutes. Lower permanent staff turnover means fewer unfilled positions and a more stable staffing environment.
Substitute teachers who have worked in a well-run, welcoming school are more likely to accept future bookings from that school. Culture affects both the demand for substitutes and the willingness of substitutes to return. These things are connected.
Where Schools Can Start
The Inspectorate's School Self-Evaluation framework, done genuinely rather than for compliance, identifies exactly where a school's culture is working and where it is not.
The substitute crisis is a structural problem. School culture is a school problem. Principals cannot resolve the first. They can substantially influence the second.
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Sources
- IPPN — Sustainable Leadership Progress Report 2024
- INTO — Teacher Workload Research Report, December 2022
- National Principals' Forum — 2025 Principal Workload Survey
- Teaching Council — Cosán Professional Learning Framework
- Teaching Council — Droichead Induction Programme
- Department of Education — School Self-Evaluation
Frequently Asked Questions
Pay is set centrally in Ireland, so what differentiates schools is culture, leadership quality, distributed responsibility, manageable workload, and meaningful professional development. Teachers stay in schools where they feel trusted, supported, and professionally respected.
Retention is strongest in schools where principals share decision-making authority, protect preparation time, distribute administrative tasks fairly, and invest in meaningful CPD. The IPPN's Sustainable Leadership research identifies protected time, manageable demands, and genuine collegial support as the core conditions of high-functioning school cultures.
Distributed leadership means responsibility is genuinely shared across a school — subject co-ordinators, year heads, and middle leaders carry meaningful authority rather than routing every decision through the principal. Schools with distributed leadership retain staff better and develop future leaders from within.
Droichead is the Teaching Council's induction programme for Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs) in Ireland. When implemented with genuine commitment — real mentoring, protected time, and meaningful professional conversation — it significantly improves the first-year experience and retention of NQTs.
Schools with strong retention need fewer substitutes to begin with. Substitute teachers are also more likely to accept future bookings from well-run, welcoming schools. School culture affects both the demand for substitutes and the willingness of substitutes to return.
