State of the Independent School Workforce project.

Get a free data benchmark summary for your school.

ISQ has partnered with PeopleBench to establish a picture of what it’s like to work in a Queensland Independent school.

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We know the staff in independent schools are what make them great places to learn.

ISQ is invested in building the best independent school workforce community; however we first need to understand and listen to the voice of current staff. The State of the Independent School Workforce project is fully-funded by ISQ and you’ll receive free individual school results when your school completes the survey. The results of this study will be revealed at the Queensland Independent School Summit (QISS 2025) on 31 July 2025.

By completing this survey, you'll get:
1

Survey summary

A summary of your results from the survey and the workforce data, anonymously benchmarked against other Queensland independent schools.

2

Risk Identification

Spot workforce risks early and provide visibility to your Board.

3

Understand Staff Experience

Better understand your staff experience including: organisational culture, staff satisfaction and engagement, goal setting, professional growth, and what’s working well in your school.

4

WIN A MINI-BREAK

One survey participant will win a two night stay at the luxurious Emporium Hotel at South Bank.

+ ADD- ON

PeopleBench’s Workforce Resilience Tracker to gain deeper insights in your individualised school data summary.

Schools who use the Resilience Tracker have seen substantial improvements in their culture and key outcomes like staff turnover. Add this critical set of metrics to your survey and receive 12 months of Resilience data and benchmarks via the PeopleBench platform, with the PeopleBench team’s support to help you plan for effective action.

Available to ISQ member schools at the discounted price of $5,995.

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Two simple steps.

Your school is warmly invited to participate in the project, which will involve two simple steps:
1

Distributing a survey to all staff to gather their input on what it’s like to work at your school. The survey will be anonymous and will take around 15 minutes to complete. It will be open from late March to mid-May

2

Sharing a set of core workforce metrics with the project team using existing standardised reports you’re already using (e.g. WGEA reports). The Workforce Innovation Unit team will support you through both of these steps.

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As they say: “What gets measured gets managed”. We’re excited to help you understand the employee experience at your school. 

Welcome to the project.

PeopleBench is an Australian education workforce management software platform . Our mission is to make schools amazing places to work so they can be amazing places to learn.

We are the leaders in school workforce benchmarking, enabling leaders from Australia to the USA to drive sustainable change in their schools through data-driven decision making. 

Through the PeopleBench platform, we use data science, machine learning, and predictive analytics to help you benchmark your workforce and always have your ‘finger on the pulse’ of important metrics like turnover and diversity, as well as the culture and resilience of your team.

We enable you to:  

  • Understand and manage workforce risk
  • Take advantage of  workforce strengths and opportunities
  • Make evidence-informed plans for the future
  • Evaluate your impact and share this with your staff, Board and other key stakeholders.   


Want to learn more about the impact of PeopleBench? You can read all about the work we did with Rockhampton Grammar School here. 

Learn more here: PeopleBench

This project aims to deliver three key benefits to the independent school sector in Queensland:

1

Providing you as a school leader with visibility of the strengths and risks present in your school’s workforce so you can prioritise your investment of time, energy and resources in the right areas

2

You’ll receive these insights via a school data summary which shows your own data anonymously compared to benchmarks for Queensland independent schools on staff perceptions of your culture, support for professional growth, their reasons for joining your school and why they might leave. You can also opt to access the PeopleBench Resilience Tracker which provides research-backed data on staff resilience (sustainable wellbeing + sustainable performance)  

3

The project will provide policy and decision-makers with visibility of the strengths and risks present across the independent school workforce state-wide, so they can make evidence-informed decisions about how best to support independent schools in the future.

Building a strong workforce starts with understanding what it’s like to work in a Queensland independent school; the best way to understand is to ask and listen to the voice of current staff. We’ll do this through a survey of all staff, and by examining existing workforce data (e.g. standard WGEA reports) across our Sector.

First, nominate a contact for the PeopleBench team to work with — this will usually be a Business Manager or HR Manager. This person will simply need to find your most recent WGEA data submission (an .xls or .csv file) and upload it to PeopleBench’s file storage securely. If you don’t have a WGEA report, the PeopleBench team will work with your nominated contact to find the next best option from the reports you already generate.

The PeopleBench and ISQ teams will handle the set-up of the survey and will send you an email inviting staff to participate with the link to the survey and frequently asked questions to get them underway. 

All you’ll need to do is:

1

Communicate with staff to inform them of your participation in the project; the reason for your participation and the benefits to the school (not to mention the 2 nights away at the Emporium prize draw if they participate!)

2

Choose to run the survey internally in a staff meeting, or have Kate from ISQ Workforce Innovation Unit join your staff meeting to help facilitate the survey over a pack of Tim Tams. Simply contact the ISQ Team to arrange through your Member Hub

3

Send an email to all staff with the survey link and you’re good to go!

The Resilience Tracker add-on to the ISQ survey provides the opportunity to take action for impact on the critical—and often missing—metric of resilience. 

You’ll get 12-months’ access to the digital PeopleBench Workforce Resilience Tracker to quickly measure resilience across your school workforce; uncapped onboarding support from our Customer Success Team to dive into the insights, and invitations to two Lunch & Learn Sessions for your Senior Leadership Team. Your Resilience Dashboard allows you to gauge strengths and risks, identify patterns and trends, and take informed action.

The Resilience Tracker is currently used by schools across Australia and the US to provide leaders with visibility of their opportunities and risks as they relate to staff wellbeing using the Resilience @ Work framework. 

If you choose to add the Resilience Tracker, it will be included alongside the other questions in the survey— there is no need to run a separate survey.

Responses to the survey will be securely held in the PeopleBench database in Australian-hosted cloud storage (via Amazon Web Services). The data will be used to a) generate your school’s data summary; b) develop a state-wide report; c) develop Queensland independent school benchmarks for inclusion in your summary and the state-wide report; and d) feed into PeopleBench’s national benchmarks.

Your school’s specific data will only be visible to you via your own summary. No individual schools will be identifiable in the state-wide report or benchmarks.

Individual staff results are not a focus of this project. The survey does not collect sensitive personal identifying information; where demographic information is collected it is done so in categories, rather than specifics (e.g. nominating age using 10-year age bands). 

Data will be presented at the aggregate level only, i.e. data will be averaged at the whole-of-school level or for groups of staff (e.g. different age bands). Where there are fewer than five staff in a group, that average will not be presented in order to preserve confidentiality.

At the end of the survey, participants who wish to go into the draw for the Emporium hotel voucher will be asked to leave their email address via a Google form link – this information is not stored in the PeopleBench database and is not associated with responses to the survey.

The project has started and will conclude with a presentation of the key findings at the Queensland Independent Schools Summit on 31 July.

Other key dates to keep in mind:

The survey will be open from March 24 to May 9. We recommend launching on March 24 to provide the best chance of a strong response rate

You’ll receive updates from the PeopleBench team throughout May and June so you can see key findings as they emerge

You’ll receive your school’s data summary by July 25.

We expect leaders will benefit from the data in several ways:

1

Reviewing it as a leadership team to understand what’s working well at the school and where there are risks or opportunities for improvement. The PeopleBench team are available to debrief the data with your team as you consider next steps

2

Using the data to inform workforce planning at your school, e.g. changes to your school improvement plan or the development of a workforce strategy

3

Sharing key findings with staff to communicate what you’ve learned and how you plan to respond

4

Sharing the data summary with your Board to provide visibility of workforce opportunities and risks, and your mitigation steps

5

Using strengths and positives from your data to feed into marketing messages to attract future student enrolments and staff candidates to your school. 

Learn more about the resilience tracker
Who are PeopleBench

Inside the PeopleBench Platform.

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Turning Around Teacher Turnover.

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.