“Our people are our greatest asset.”
It’s a phrase we hear constantly in leadership development programs. In K-12 education, research backs this up—studies and meta-analyses confirm that engaging teaching practices and teacher mindset are among the most statistically significant in-school factors influencing student achievement.
But here’s what the research also tells us: schools are complex organisations employing staff across many job families and role types. It takes just one unwelcoming receptionist or disengaged groundsperson or to undermine school culture or create conditions where student and staff injuries become more likely. When school culture starts to erode, declining attendance, falling enrollment, and increased staff turnover typically follow.
How every adult in your school shows up matters—a lot. Our people are indeed our greatest asset, but they’re also potentially our greatest liability.
For those carrying leadership and governance responsibilities in schools, two questions demand urgent attention:
To what degree do we understand, have visibility of, and feel able to influence our performance on workforce factors?
Are we using our workforce data proactively—nurturing staffing strengths while actively mitigating workforce risks before they materialise?
Information about your school’s changing workforce composition, internal and external mobility patterns, staff wellbeing, and the lived experience of working in your environment provides crucial insights for building positive, high-impact work environments. Workforce data offers a window into the sustainability of schooling itself.
The Uncomfortable Truth About School Workforce Data
In our work at PeopleBench, we consistently ask leaders about their ability to access and utilise workforce data for informed decision-making.
For most, the answer is simple: “I don’t.”
The education sector isn’t unique here. Reflecting on my enterprise leadership experience and learnings from complex HRIS implementations, I was consistently stunned by the additional human effort and expertise required to make our existing HR data … usable.
The barriers are familiar: poor data quality, limited context for key metrics (turnover rates mean little without understanding the why), and the specialised HR and data science expertise needed to transform raw data into actionable insights.
These same challenges exist in schools today. Most leaders either don’t consider workforce data critical, or only seek it when fighting fires—parent complaints, unexpected resignations, rising burnout, psychological injury claims. By then, asking for workforce reports is like checking the day’s fire danger rating while driving through plumes of smoke. Too little, too late.
Here’s my favorite question for school leaders: Do you understand how your workforce is traveling today, and how do you know?
I want to understand their processes and their confidence that any efforts they’re making to improve the experience of working in their school/s are actually moving the needle.
Some point to staff listening sessions, others to surveys combining quantitative and qualitative measures, perhaps “joiners and leavers” reports from HR. But most describe their days as an endless cycle of fighting staff bushfires, relying on intuition and peer networks to decide how to slow turnover, retain priority cohorts (like early career teachers), invest in professional learning, or address rising psychological injury claims. They also frequently report feeling lonely and unsupported in trying to address these challenges.
The leaders we work with aren’t isolated cases. Everyone feels their workforce data is a mess, and this perception frequently prevents action.
Here’s the good news: you can make significant progress without burdening staff.
If you employ staff, you already collect workforce data. If you support their professional learning, you’re likely collecting more. The key to making a start is knowing which workforce data you already have, and which metrics matter most when building a high-impact school workforce.
This is where workforce analytics becomes critical for effective schooling. AI is already showing real promise in improving HR data accessibility and usability, with solutions like PeopleBench making that crucial first step easier than ever.
Aggregate your existing HR data to create one cohesive baseline picture. This single step can dramatically mature your workforce data practices.
Workforce data’s value multiplies when considered in context. Knowing your school’s average turnover is decreasing sounds positive—but is it? Are comparable schools experiencing more or less turnover? How does turnover correlate with student outcomes in your specific environment over time?
Benchmarking with comparable schools and combining workforce data with student outcomes data transforms raw numbers into valuable insights.
Workforce benchmarking in education—particularly at system, state, and national levels—allows school leaders to learn from both their own experiences and their peers’ de-identified data, enabling better-informed resource allocation decisions.
When used transparently in well-facilitated conversations, benchmarked workforce data becomes a powerful catalyst. It helps leaders, teachers, and institutions share challenges and opportunities while co-designing solutions together. Benchmarking develops shared language and data-informed decision-making, moving beyond “intuition-only” responses toward evidence-based practice that incorporates academic research and expert HR insights.
HR Analytics—analysing people-related data to measure program effectiveness and identify impact patterns—isn’t new. Companies like Google, Microsoft, and NASA began leveraging these approaches over a decade ago, using computing technologies to enhance workforce-related decision-making.
Today, schools can benefit from practices well-established in other sectors, remembering that HR data is of greatest value when it helps us understand factors impacting student outcomes.
We don’t need to reinvent the workforce data wheel in K-12.
Most schools simply need support taking that first step and charting a path beyond the firefighting cycle.
Introducing standard practices for collecting, benchmarking, and interrogating workforce data to improve how we recruit, retain, and support staff for maximum student impact—that’s what HR analytics offers education.
Change starts with a single step forward; your workforce data improvement journey can begin today.
Move from good intentions to evidence-informed actions on your people priorities.
Keep up-to-date Turning Around Teacher Turnover is a 6-part email series that proactively addresses teacher turnover, and how schools can retain talent, and attract staff.
