The Eight Things Keeping a Principal Up at Night
I have written before about the changing nature of principalship.
Child safety in an increasingly legal and digital environment; the rise of psychosocial risk; parent expectations; the negative rhetoric propagated by the media about schools; the challenge of attracting and retaining exceptional teachers; artificial intelligence; reputation management; high-performance; financial sustainability; are just some of the current issues in 2026.
These are some of the things that are currently keeping a principal up at night.
1. Child Safety & Wellbeing
The risks and complexities of keeping children safe requires schools to navigate an increasingly complex mix of legal, risk, and reporting obligations. We are also living in an era of diagnosis, where increasing numbers of children present with additional needs, neurodivergence, disability, disorder and difference. This reflects genuine progress around awareness, earlier intervention, and reduced stigma, but also places greater expectations on schools. This extends to issues like:
The expanding burden placed on schools to respond to matters well beyond their traditional remit, including issues emerging in the home and outside ordinary school hours.
Spilt families with complicated access, communication and fee arrangements.
Anxiety, depression, self-harm, eating disorders, school refusal
Bullying – in person and online
2. Parents
The payment of fees can lead some families to view the school relationship through a commercial, transactional, or consumer lens. This can create expectations that are not always aligned with the professional judgement of educators or the realities of leading a school community. While families are right to expect high standards, strong communication and excellent care, principals make decisions with their teams in the best interest of the entire community.
Other issues include:
Parents who want something the school doesn’t and won’t offer as part of their programs.
The parents who want the school to do something about their child playing video games at nighttime.
The parents who say they love the school but are happy to threaten legal action and to go to the media if they don’t get their own way.
Some parents think that you should be available immediately, know the intimate details of their situation, and that you should personally respond to every single matter that is happening across the school.
Parents who have unreasonable expectations and are never happy.
The tension of approving long service leave for staff (of which they are entitled) and then having to deal with parent backlash about their child having a different teacher.
The annual Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety, and Wellbeing Survey conducted by ACU has cited parents as the main source of cyber bullying of Principals. This bullying behavior is done primarily in WhatsApp groups and in online forums. Ironically, the same parents will be the first to complain if this happens to their child.
3. Staff
Attraction, retention, capability, teacher shortages, leadership pipelines, persistent concerns about workload, public perceptions of the profession, managing psychosocial hazards as a workplace safety issue, responding to growing diversity and inclusion obligations, disability standards, professional learning requirements, AI and shadow AI usage, the list could continue.
A further challenge for school leaders is navigating situations in which legislative frameworks, including those relating to psychosocial safety, are at times invoked not as safeguards for genuine risk, but as instruments in interpersonal conflict, grievance or resistance to accountability.
Others include:
Increasing numbers of staff required to manage risk, HR, IR, OHS, child safety etc.
Staffing hard to staff areas – languages, specialist mathematics, and technology.
Workplace bullying/stress allegations vs reasonable management action.
Accommodating part time staff and workplace flexibility
Balancing high-performance related to stated goals and metrics and the development of a people-centered culture.
Staff who game the system and utilize all their sick leave on their way to retirement.
Managing the 2 or 3 staff members in every school who don’t want to be there, don’t like the school or their job, but feel stuck.
Removing toxic staff or staff who are unable or unprepared to fulfil the inherent requirements of their role.
Enterprise bargaining – managing union representatives and making sure your people are paid well and have great benefits. This will prove interesting over the next few years for independent schools given the latest EA negotiations with the AEU (government sector) seeking a 36% increase, while the IEU (Catholic sector) is seeking increases of 17%, 10% and 10% over three years. Personally, I am 100% supportive of teachers being paid more. They should be. However, there will be limits of what some independent schools can actually afford – particularly the smaller schools across the country.
4. Fees & Affordability
Recent Independent Schools Australia (ISA) data shows the sector continues to grow year on year, while newer ABS data shows the sector grew by 3.4% in 2025, making it the fastest-growing school sector in the country. There will inevitably be a tipping point at which the cumulative effect of annual fee increases places independent schooling beyond the reach of more families, particularly in a climate of persistent cost-of-living pressure. This, combined with independent schools receiving less government funding through to 2029 under the new Direct Measure of Income (DMI) model, creates uncertainty.
Further issues for principals include:
Asking “When will you price yourself out of your market?”
The impact of the economy, and measures such as CPI, and the Wage Growth Index.
Understanding your demography and direct competitors.
As a not-for-profit organization, approx 70% of revenue goes to staff salaries and on-costs and around 30% goes to operational costs, programs, and capital improvements. Any surplus each year gets reinvested back into the school – improved conditions for staff, better facilities, new programs and opportunities for students. And schools need to reinvest in their school at a rate greater than depreciation. If they don’t, they slowly run down the very conditions that make great learning possible - buildings, resources, systems, and their capacity to innovate. This then has negative effects on reputation and enrolment, people lose jobs, the range of offerings needs to contract, which leads to further enrolment loss, which leads to further job loss - a self-fulfilling negative spiral that has closed many schools.
Budget levers that can be accessed include - Class sizes – what is the ideal class size? Number and breadth of subjects offered across the school. Co-curricular offerings and how much of this is funded by the school v passed onto families. Minimum class size to run a subject? 3, 6, 10? If 27 students choose a particular subject, do you run 1 class or 2 classes? If 100 students choose a subject, do you run 4 classes or 5?
People often want contradictory things – for instance, people want low prices when they shop, high wages for themselves, cheap labor for when they need work done, rising house prices when they own, and then lower house prices when their children want to buy. In a school context, staff want less work, more money, more time, lower class sizes (which limits revenue), greater opportunities, more professional learning, and more autonomy. Parents want lower fees, and yet outstanding facilities, greater choice and opportunity in offerings, and greater academic outcomes for their children. The economics of more, more, more, for everyone, all the time, doesn’t add up.
5. Risk and Compliance
Risk in schools in 2026 spans child safety, legal and compliance, reputational, financial, workforce, cyber and data, governance, operational, strategic risk, and the growing complexity of family and community expectations. It is also important to remember that as a Principal everything you write or say could end up in the media or with lawyers.
Questions Principals should be asking themselves:
Have we identified and mitigated risks, assessed their potential impact, and developed actionable management plans? Who oversees this work? Is it widely understood?
Are we compliant?
Do we have a business continuity plan? A crisis management plan?
Do I regularly run desktop simulation with the Executive on response to scenarios related to cybersecurity, data breaches, and a broad range of critical incidents that could include fire, flood, loss of power, transport issues, workplace accidents, loss of a community member?
Do we have the right insurances and indemnities in place?
How will I manage external organizations like WorkCover, WorkSafe, VRQA, CRICOS, and the Social Services Regulator, and do key staff personal feel confident and equipped in this space?
How will I manage historical issues that might emerge?
6. Enrolments
Without students a school doesn’t exist.
Issues include:
The ongoing viability of a school – what is the minimum number for a school to continue to operate?
Is the school growing or declining in enrolment and what is our strategy?
Who is our competition?
Have we planned for the eventuation of a new competitor entering the market?
Are we affordable? Are our fees too low?
Have we done detailed and sophisticated demographics analysis and market research?
What is the current and future marketing strategy needed to attract and retain families?
7. Financial Sustainability
Independent schools hold two truths – they are places of teaching and learning and they are not-for-profit businesses.
Key questions include:
Are we financially viable and sustainable?
Do we have defined financial targets?
Do we reach the financial targets every year?
How much debt do we carry? Can we service that debt? What is our debt appetite?
How much operating surplus?
Have we completed 10 to 15 years financial forecasts and cash flow modeling aligned with our enrolment trends, strategy, and masterplan?
Can we maintain and improve our existing facilities and assets?
How will we build future buildings and facilities?
What areas do we need to invest in? Our people, IT, cybersecurity. What else?
Could we cope with a recession, new competitor, interest rate rise, building industry collapse, large staff salary increases or loss of 10% of our enrolment? Have we run these scenarios as part of our forecasting and modelling?
8. Cyber Security
Cyber incidents can move with extraordinary speed from technical disruption to student safety, privacy breach, reputational damage, operational paralysis and intense community scrutiny – with a critical cyber incident in Australia reported every 6 minutes, it is not a matter of if, but when. Schools need to invest in increasing their cybersecurity posture, stance, and maturity levels, and Boards need to consider developing a cyber risk appetite.
Key issues include:
Ransomware and system lockouts
Phishing and business email compromise
Protection of sensitive student, parent and staff data.
The rising volume of reportable breaches
Cyber awareness training
Third-party vendor and platform risk — schools increasingly rely on external edtech platforms, cloud services, payment providers and communication tools.
AI – innovation, privacy and data governance.
Incident readiness and leadership response — a major issue is not just whether a school is attacked, but whether it knows how to respond in the first hours - containing the breach, assessing harm, restoring services, communicating with families and regulators, and preserving trust.
