A new ACU study has identified strategies to address Australia's growing school principal turnover using reforms that focus on workplace commitment and the management of cognitive workload.
The research, published in Discover Computing, analysed data from 1630 Australian principals over two years using machine learning techniques.
Lead researcher Professor Jiesi Guo and PhD candidate Danling Huang at ACU's Institute for Positive Psychology and Education said the findings offer actionable insights for enhancing principal retention by strengthening psychological connection to the workplace and managing cognitive workload.
The study recommends education departments introduce workload-reduction policies that streamline administrative requirements and shift non-instructional tasks away from principals.
It suggests providing schools with business managers, digital administration systems, and decision-support tools to reduce cognitive complexity.
Professional development should also move beyond compliance-based training and instead focus on long-term growth, leadership efficacy, and a sense of meaning at work, the study found.
It also called for system-wide support, including national or state-funded principal wellbeing programs, structured mentoring networks, and policies that promote flexible work arrangements to ease work-family conflict.
At the school level, they recommend leadership coaching and mentoring to help principals build self-efficacy and develop more adaptive coping strategies.
Ms Huang said schools are also encouraged to use regular feedback cycles, staff recognition, and shared goal setting to strengthen a sense of purpose.
"Education systems could also appoint executive assistants or business managers to handle finance, compliance, and scheduling, allowing principals to focus more on instructional leadership," she said.
The machine learning model identified workplace commitment, job satisfaction, and cognitive demands as the strongest predictors of principals' intention to leave. It found that that up to 50 per cent of Australian principals indicated they will leave the profession before reaching retirement age.
"Commitment to the workplace, job satisfaction, and cognitive demands emerged as the strongest predictors of turnover intention," Ms Huang.
The model achieved accuracy rates of more than 81 per cent in predicting turnover intentions.
The research team, which also included Dr Jinran Wu, Hamed Mogouie, and Professor Theresa Dicke, found principal turnover reflects complex interactions between individual and systemic factors rather than any single cause.
The study builds on earlier work from the principal wellbeing team by incorporating random effects to account for differences across states and education systems to deliver more accurate predictions than traditional statistical approaches.
