School climate surveys for learners and teachers: a case study from south Africa

The climate that prevails in schools, including issues of violence and lack of trust, has major implications for learner and teacher performance and their well-being. National or global data on various dimensions of the school climate are important to inform policy. But these data typically cannot be used to inform behavioral change at the level of individual schools, both because most schools are not part of the surveys’ sampling frame and because recommendations based on national-level data are often too generic to be of high value to specific schools. This paper discusses the experience of Catholic schools in South Africa with implementing low-cost survey instruments on the school climate with both learners and teachers. The initiative is part of the Catholic Institute for Education approach towards building peaceful schools. The paper presents the survey instruments and key results with the hope that this can encourage other school systems to adopt similar approaches.