45 Essential Thought Leaders on Principal Burnout

Introduction

If you lead a school in Australia or New Zealand in 2026, the statistics emerging from recent research are almost impossible to look away from. More than half of all Australian school leaders, 54.4 per cent according to the most recent ACU survey, report that they seriously consider leaving their current job. Nearly half, 47.8 per cent, experienced physical violence at work in 2025. Across the Tasman, a Newstalk ZB analysis found that 967 principals quit in a three-year period, with one in five walking away within their first year in the role. New Zealand principals suffer burnout at 1.7 times the rate of the general population. These are not marginal figures. They describe a profession under structural strain that has no quick fix.

What makes the conversation in Australia and New Zealand distinct from the global debate is the quality and depth of the research being produced here. The 15-year longitudinal Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey, the Invisible Labour project out of Monash University, the Deakin educator health and wellbeing research program, and a growing network of wellbeing practitioners and peak body advocates are building an evidence base that is reshaping how governments, systems, and individual schools understand the principalship.

I put together this list to surface the people at the centre of that conversation. Each person here was selected against three criteria. First, they have made a documented contribution to the understanding, advocacy, or practice of principal wellbeing and sustainability in the Australian or New Zealand context. Second, they are actively engaged in the field as of 2025 or 2026. Third, the list was deliberately built to include researchers, peak body advocates, and practitioners, recognising that lasting change requires all three working together.

Forty-five people made the final list, not fifty. This field is real and specific, and naming forty-five well-sourced, active voices is more useful than padding to a round number with weaker candidates. The goal is to help principals, deputy principals, system leaders, school boards, and policy makers find the voices worth following, the research worth reading, and the advocates worth supporting.

If you are a school leader who is exhausted and wondering whether you are alone in that experience, this list is also for you. You are not alone. There is a substantial community of people who understand your situation, take it seriously, and are working at every level of the system to change it. For support connecting your own team around the culture and leadership dynamics that underpin sustainability, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Principal Burnout Matters

The phrase "principal burnout" can make it sound like a private health problem, a matter of individual resilience or personal coping. The research tells a different story. When principals burn out, leave, or become depleted, the consequences run directly through to every teacher in the building and every student in every classroom.

The March 2026 ACU survey, marking 15 years of continuous data collection, found that stress, burnout, and workload pressures are at critical levels. Nearly half of all Australian principals experienced physical violence and more than half faced threats of violence in 2025. Anxiety and depression among school leaders have trended upward since 2023, with 10.3 per cent of principals now recording severe anxiety scores. On average, Australian principals work almost 54 hours per week.

The Monash University Invisible Labour study, drawing on 298 critical incident testimonies from 256 public school principals, found that principals routinely suppress their own emotions to maintain calm and professionalism, a hidden cost that leads to emotional exhaustion and burnout. The study found that the emotional demands of leadership are gendered, racialised, and shaped by resource context, with women and principals in disadvantaged schools disproportionately affected.

Across the Tasman, New Zealand's NZPF secured a $30.2 million government investment in principal leadership development in the 2025 budget, a sign that the sustainability crisis has become visible enough at the policy level to attract meaningful resources. Yet the NZ Herald analysis published in December 2025 confirmed that the pipeline remains fragile, with one in five new principals quitting within their first year.

The cost of not addressing this is not abstract. Schools lose experienced principals at rates that destabilise whole communities. Beginning principals arrive into roles for which they feel ill-prepared. The profession struggles to attract the next generation of leaders at precisely the moment when the pipeline is most vulnerable.

If your school or organisation is seeking help building the leadership culture and team dynamics that support sustainability at every level, Jonno White works with schools around the world on the communication, accountability, and team building foundations that make every other leadership investment more effective. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

For more on the leadership pipeline crisis that sits upstream of individual burnout, read "25 Crucial Fixes for School Leadership Pipeline Collapse" at consultclarity.org/post/school-leadership-pipeline-collapse.

How This List Was Compiled

Every person on this list was selected against three criteria. First, a documented contribution to the understanding, advocacy, or practice of principal wellbeing and sustainability in the Australian or New Zealand context. Second, active engagement in the field as of 2025 or 2026. Third, a deliberate effort to include researchers, peak body leaders, and practitioners, recognising that the gap between research and practice is one of the defining problems in this field.

The list moved past the most visible household names to surface researchers, mid-tier practitioners, and New Zealand voices that may be less familiar to an Australian audience and vice versa. Geographic diversity, disciplinary range, and the balance between structural critique and practical tools were all active considerations in the final selection.

The Research Foundation

These nine researchers are producing the evidence base that describes the crisis and, increasingly, the conditions under which it can be addressed.

1. Prof. Phil Riley, Deakin University

Phil Riley is the founder of the Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey, the longest-running longitudinal study of its kind in the world, now in its fifteenth year and having reached over 7,000 Australian school principals. A former school principal himself who spent 16 years in schools before moving to the tertiary sector, he has accumulated over $8 million in research funding including three prestigious Australian Research Council grants, and produced more than 200 publications on the intersection of psychology, education, and leadership.

Riley's statement that the principal is the canary in the coal mine captures the relationship between school leadership health and school system health that has become the organising insight of the entire field. His most recent publications at Deakin examine the prevalence of emotional exhaustion and burnout across the principal career span and continue to make the case that occupational health investment in school leaders is not a welfare gesture but a system effectiveness imperative.

2. Prof. Theresa Dicke, Australian Catholic University

Theresa Dicke is Professor and lead investigator of the Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey at ACU's Institute for Positive Psychology and Education. Her research focuses on resources and their relationship with occupational wellbeing, with particular attention to the role of self-beliefs in the stress development and health maintenance process among school leaders.

In her 2026 commentary following the survey's 15-year milestone, Dicke delivered the clearest structural diagnosis the field has yet produced: "The top stressors remain Sheer Quantity of Work and Lack of Time to Focus on Teaching and Learning, and they've held those positions since 2011. That tells us the solution is not another short-term initiative or asking Principals to be more resilient; it's redesigning what Principals are asked to do, resourcing it properly, and removing work that does not contribute to student learning and safety."

3. Dr Ben Arnold, Deakin University

Ben Arnold is a Senior Lecturer in Educational Leadership at Deakin University and a core researcher in the Educator Health and Wellbeing program. His research focuses on teacher professionalism, work, health, and sustainability, with particular emphasis on how education policies and working conditions in school systems affect the health, sustainability, and diversity of the education workforce.

A 2025 paper co-authored by Arnold and Mark Rahimi in the Australian Educational Researcher investigated the factors most strongly associated with school leaders' intentions to leave, identifying workload, psychosocial working conditions, and the absence of genuine professional autonomy as the key predictors. Arnold has also written for BERA and the Education International on how administrative burdens combine with emotional and cognitive demands to affect school leader wellbeing in both Australia and Ireland.

4. Dr Mark Rahimi, Deakin University and the University of Melbourne

Mark Rahimi is a senior psychosocial researcher working across Deakin University and the University of Melbourne, with a focus on education policy and leadership, large-scale quantitative analyses, and longitudinal research into educator health, safety, and wellbeing. He works alongside Phil Riley and Ben Arnold on both the Australian and Irish occupational health and wellbeing surveys for principals.

In commenting on the Australian Teacher Work, Health and Wellbeing Report released in 2025, Rahimi articulated the structural argument with directness: "To protect teachers' mental health and sustain the quality of education, we must improve work environments, reducing excessive admin, ensuring support for complex needs, setting realistic workloads, and giving teachers a genuine voice in shaping the policies that affect their work." The Irish longitudinal study, which Rahimi has co-led, provides comparative evidence that the Australian principal burnout crisis is not unique but reflects a global pattern of unsustainable school leadership conditions.

5. Dr Fiona Longmuir, Monash University

Fiona Longmuir is a Senior Lecturer in Educational Leadership and Co-leader of the Education Workforce for the Future Impact Lab at Monash University. She is a chief investigator on the Invisible Labour: Principals' Emotional Labour in Volatile Times project, the most significant qualitative study of its kind to emerge from Australia this decade.

Longmuir has more than 15 years of experience as a primary teacher, curriculum leader, and school leader, which grounds the practical orientation of her academic research. Her March 2026 Monash Lens commentary, published following the Invisible Labour final report, described what is happening to public school principals not as a surface-level workload problem but as a structural occupational crisis involving the suppression of emotion, the management of violence, and the absence of adequate psychosocial support. She contributes regularly to public and policy discussions on the sustainability of the teaching and leadership workforce.

6. Prof. Jane Wilkinson, Monash University

Jane Wilkinson is Professor of Educational Leadership at Monash University and lead researcher on the Australian Research Council-funded Invisible Labour: Principals' Emotional Labour in Volatile Times project. She leads research into educational leadership for social justice, with particular attention to issues of gender and ethnicity, and has published widely on women and leadership, refugee education, and the theory of practice architectures.

The Invisible Labour project drew on 298 critical incident testimonies from 256 Australian public school principals to document the hidden emotional toll of the principalship. The March 2026 report, presented at the ASPA National Summit in Canberra, called explicitly for "urgent reform at every level of governance" to protect principals' physical and psychosocial safety. Wilkinson's work has been a primary driver of the national conversation on how the emotional labour of school leadership is gendered, racialised, and shaped by resource context.

7. Prof. Lucas Walsh, Monash University

Lucas Walsh is Director of the Monash Centre for Youth Policy and Education Practice and Chief Investigator of the Invisible Labour project. His research explores how young people navigate the world beyond school and what education and training they need to do so. He is co-chief investigator of the Q Project on quality use of evidence in schools, funded by the Paul Ramsay Foundation.

Walsh has been a consistent public commentator on principal emotional labour. His February 2026 Monash Lens commentary described the Australian context as one in which the principal's emotional labour, defined as managing one's emotions and those of others, is central to the role yet absent from virtually every policy framework and job description that governs it. "We know that principals' work is stressful," Walsh wrote, "involving a constant juggle of often-conflicting demands of students, staff, parents and carers, amongst others."

8. Associate Prof. Paul Kidson, Australian Catholic University

Paul Kidson is Associate Professor and Head of Postgraduate Studies in the National School of Education at ACU. He is a co-investigator on the Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey and a former school principal with 11 years of experience across NSW and Victorian schools. His research adopts holistic, interdisciplinary approaches to how school leaders work within and critically transform their complex professional lives.

Kidson has been one of the most direct voices translating survey data into policy language. Following the 2026 survey results, he called for systemic structural reform, arguing that "the sustainability of school leaders requires these supportive strategies" at the system level rather than incremental adjustments. He is a Fellow of the Institute for Managers and Leaders and a Graduate of the Australian Institute for Company Directors.

9. A/Prof. Rebecca Collie, UNSW

Rebecca Collie is Scientia Associate Professor in the School of Education at UNSW and one of Australia's most cited researchers in teacher and school leader wellbeing. Her research focuses on motivation, wellbeing, and social-emotional development among students and teachers, and she works with unions, government agencies, and researchers internationally to promote evidence-led policy change. Her work is regularly cited in OECD education reports and referenced in Senate inquiries.

Her 2025 paper co-authored with Helena Granziera and colleagues, investigating the workload, turnover intentions, and mental health of nearly 5,000 Australian teachers, was one of the most widely cited research outputs in Australian education that year. Collie's research demonstrates that teacher wellbeing is of critical importance to student academic development and that "teacher well-being and teacher-student relationships are deeply interconnected."

The Advocates

These eight voices represent the institutional, policy, and sector-level advocacy that translates research into system change.

10. Angela Falkenberg, APPA

Angela Falkenberg is President of the Australian Primary Principals Association (APPA), re-elected to a second term for 2025 to 2026, representing over 7,600 primary school principals across government, Catholic, and independent schools. She has been one of the clearest national voices on the structural roots of principal burnout, consistently arguing that the problem requires system-level change rather than individual resilience programmes.

Her response to the November 2025 Invisible Labour report was unambiguous: "Emotional labour is a structural occupational issue, not an individual coping problem. Attracting and retaining strong, capable school leaders requires system-level change." APPA under Falkenberg has called for formal recognition of emotional labour in the principal role, system-wide professional supervision and trauma-informed support, reduced administrative burden, and targeted assistance for leaders in high-need and complex contexts.

11. Leanne Otene, NZPF

Leanne Otene is President of the New Zealand Principals' Federation and the elected International Confederation of Principals representative for the Asia-Oceania region. A former principal with nearly 30 years of experience, she was also the first Wahine Maori President of NZPF when elected in 2023. Her international role sees her in regular contact with OECD leaders of the Education and Assessment unit.

Otene has been the primary advocate in New Zealand for the Roadmap to Sustainable Principal Leadership, a programme co-designed with the Ministry of Education that secured $30.2 million in the 2025 government budget for principal leadership development. She frames principal wellbeing not as an individual responsibility but as a system responsibility, arguing clearly that "if we want great schools, we need to ensure principals are well-supported, prepared, and valued throughout their careers."

12. Andy Mison, ASPA

Andy Mison is President of the Australian Secondary Principals' Association (ASPA), the national peak body for public secondary school principals across all Australian states and territories, and a Director of AITSL. He has worked across NSW, the Northern Territory, and the ACT as a teacher and school leader for over 30 years.

Mison has been a driving force behind the National Principals' Reference Group, a direct dialogue mechanism between practising principals and federal education ministers. His 2026 ASPA Policy Briefing is explicit that principal health and wellbeing and workforce sustainability are among the most urgent reform priorities for Australian secondary schools. His advocacy extends to specific structural protections: workload caps, professional supervision programmes, and clear system-level responses when principals signal acute distress.

13. Dr Chris Duncan, AHISA

Chris Duncan is CEO of the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia (AHISA), representing over 460 independent school heads whose schools collectively account for more than 11 per cent of total Australian school enrolments. He brings a measured, evidence-grounded voice to the national principal wellbeing conversation.

In responding to the 2026 ACU principal wellbeing survey, Duncan observed that the ACU 15-year longitudinal study and the Monash Invisible Labour research together provide a complementary evidence base for genuine systemic change. He has consistently positioned AHISA as part of the Coalition of Australian Principals, the multi-sector advocacy body that coordinates a unified national voice across government, Catholic, and independent sectors. His is a voice that ensures the principal sustainability conversation reaches beyond the public system.

14. Correna Haythorpe, AEU

Correna Haythorpe is Federal President of the Australian Education Union, the third-largest trade union in Australia. She spent 17 years in classrooms before becoming active in union leadership, serving as SA branch president before taking on the federal presidency in 2015.

The AEU's response to the Invisible Labour report in late 2025 called for urgent government action, noting that principals are facing growing psychosocial hazards including violence, burnout, and emotional exhaustion that are not being adequately acknowledged or addressed. Haythorpe has consistently framed principal wellbeing as a workforce issue requiring structural workplace protections, not individual resilience programmes. Her advocacy reaches through to the bargaining table, which makes it consequential in a way that policy commentary alone cannot be.

15. Bali Haque, New Zealand Education

Bali Haque (MNZM) has served as principal of four secondary schools, President of the Secondary Principals' Association of New Zealand, a PPTA Executive member, deputy chief executive of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, and chair of the Independent Taskforce reviewing Tomorrow's Schools for the New Zealand government.

Haque's analysis of New Zealand's school system consistently returns to the theme of unsustainable structural isolation. His description of the Tomorrow's Schools legacy is directly relevant to the principal burnout conversation: "what we have in New Zealand is a system where individual schools, teachers, principals and boards are left far too much on their own to fend for themselves. One of the consequences of that is huge workloads for teachers and principals." His systemic critique has shaped the New Zealand policy reform conversation for over a decade.

16. Sally Ruston AM, APPA

Sally Ruston AM is Deputy President of the Australian Primary Principals Association, now serving her third consecutive term in that role. Based at Abbotsleigh in Sydney where she serves as Head of Junior School, she has been a member of the APPA Board and National Advisory Council since 2018. Her AM award reflects her distinguished contribution to primary education in Australia.

Ruston represents a grounded practical perspective within the APPA leadership structure. Her sustained involvement in national principal advocacy gives her voice an institutional weight that complements the more public profile of the APPA president. She has been a consistent presence in the national conversation about what primary school leaders need to lead well and sustain themselves across a full career.

17. Prof. David Gurr, University of Melbourne

David Gurr is Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Melbourne, one of Australia's most prolific researchers in school leadership with more than 230 publications and 230 conference presentations. He is a founding member of the International Successful School Principalship Project and the International School Leadership Development Network, and was awarded the Australian Council for Educational Leaders Gold Medal in 2024.

Gurr's research encompasses the full scope of the principalship, from what successful school leadership looks like to how leaders navigate crisis and build community resilience. His 2025 collaborative paper on Australasian principals' experiences with crises examined how years of experience do not necessarily protect school leaders from the burnout and exhaustion that crises produce. His voice connects the academic study of leadership effectiveness with the practical realities of sustainable practice.

The Wellbeing Practitioners

These eight people work directly with schools and school leaders to build the practical conditions for sustainability.

18. Justin Robinson, The Wellbeing Distillery

Justin Robinson is co-founder of The Wellbeing Distillery, a Brisbane-based organisation that has partnered with over 550 schools across Australia and 26 countries to embed evidence-informed wellbeing into school life. A former teacher and founding Director of the Institute of Positive Education at Geelong Grammar School, he holds an M.Ed. in Leadership and a Certificate in Positive Psychology.

His School Wellbeing Operating System (swOS) framework has become one of the most widely adopted whole-school wellbeing models in Australian schools. He presented at the 2025 Victorian Government Schools Principals Conference on "A School Wellbeing Operating System for Sustainable Success," arguing that schools must move beyond wellbeing as a standalone programme toward wellbeing as a structural operating system embedded in how a school is led at every level.

19. David Bott, The Wellbeing Distillery

David Bott is co-founder and Co-Founding Director of The Wellbeing Distillery alongside Justin Robinson. Formerly Associate Director of the Institute of Positive Education at Geelong Grammar and a founding member of the Dubai Future Council for Education, he has trained educators from over 1,000 schools globally and serves on the PESA Board.

Bott is co-author of 10 Things Schools Get Wrong (John Catt, 2022), widely used in Australian school leadership professional development. His LinkedIn writing on school leader sustainability has included a practical and widely shared framework about what he calls the "simmering seven," the chronic mid-level pressure state where leaders are permanently available but never truly present, which he argues is more dangerous than acute burnout precisely because it is tolerable enough to persist indefinitely.

20. Dr Denise Quinlan, NZIWR

Denise Quinlan is co-Director of the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing and Resilience and one of the leading positive education practitioners in Aotearoa. As the only trainer from Australia and New Zealand selected to deliver the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Resiliency Programme, she has worked alongside researchers and practitioners at leading schools in both countries, including Geelong Grammar School, St Peter's College Adelaide, and Wellington College.

She is co-author with Dr Lucy Hone of The Educator's Guide to Whole-School Wellbeing (Taylor and Francis, 2020), which provides the practical implementation framework for sustainable wellbeing in school communities. Quinlan's work with New Zealand schools on the realities of wellbeing system-building in resource-constrained contexts makes her one of the most practically grounded voices in this space.

21. Dr Lucy Hone, NZIWR

Lucy Hone is co-Director of the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing and Resilience and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the University of Canterbury. Her TED talk, Three Secrets of Resilient People, is one of the top 20 most-watched TED talks globally and has introduced resilience science to a broad public audience.

She is co-author with Dr Denise Quinlan of The Educator's Guide to Whole-School Wellbeing (Taylor and Francis, 2020), and her PhD was recognised for its outstanding contribution to wellbeing science at the World Congress in Positive Psychology in 2019. Hone's contribution to the New Zealand principal wellbeing conversation is significant because she consistently grounds resilience not in individual willpower but in structural and relational conditions, asking what organisations rather than individuals need to do to make sustainable practice possible.

22. Amy Green, The Wellness Strategy

Amy Green is founder of The Wellness Strategy, a keynote speaker, facilitator, coach, and published author working with school leaders and organisations across Australia. A former teacher and school leader with a background in human behaviour, coaching, and positive psychology, she was a keynote presenter at the 2025 Victorian Government Schools Principals Conference, where her session was titled "Leading Well: Creating Thriving Schools Through Wellbeing-Driven Leadership."

Green's work directly addresses principal and staff burnout as a systemic design problem rather than a personal care problem. Her keynotes challenge the "performative wellbeing" trap, arguing that the more schools treat wellbeing as something to be optimised and achieved, the further it recedes. She hosts The Work of Wellbeing podcast and is consistently active on LinkedIn sharing practical frameworks for school leaders who want to lead sustainably.

23. Adrienne Hornby, Adrienne Hornby Consulting

Adrienne Hornby is a Staff Wellbeing Consultant and Strategist for Schools, the host of the Well-Led Schools podcast, and a former teacher and school leader in ACT government schools. She became a Health and Wellbeing Coach in 2018 and has since built a consultancy focused on helping school leaders collect wellbeing data and build tailored Staff Wellbeing Action Plans.

Hornby's consultancy model is notable for its data-first approach. Rather than delivering generic professional development, she works with school leadership teams to survey their specific school community, identify the actual drivers of staff stress and disengagement, and build wellbeing frameworks that address those root causes. Her 2025 research synthesis of teacher wellbeing data across more than 60 Australian schools produced contextualised findings about what Australian school communities actually need as opposed to what is commonly assumed.

24. Bianca McLeish, Teacher Wellbeing Academy

Bianca McLeish is a School Wellbeing Consultant, former teacher with over 20 years of classroom experience, and author of Teacher Wellbeing Transformed: Break Free From Survival Mode Before Burnout (2025). She founded the Teacher Wellbeing Academy following her own experience of burnout, building a practice grounded in neuroscience and Positive Psychology.

Her book addresses both individual teachers and the school leaders who must create the conditions for sustainable practice. Its central argument, that burnout reflects systemic demands exceeding available resources rather than personal weakness, aligns with the most current structural critique in the research literature. Her workshops focus specifically on nervous system regulation as a precondition for the interpersonal and leadership skills that sustainable school leadership requires.

25. Meg Durham, Open Mind Education

Meg Durham is a Wellbeing Speaker, Educator, and Coach who hosts The School of Wellbeing, one of Australia's most widely listened-to podcasts for teachers and school leaders. Based in Queensland, she works with school communities across Australia on practical skills in energy management, boundary-setting, and sustainable leadership.

Her podcast has featured substantive conversations with researchers including Helena Granziera and practitioners including Brad Gaynor and David Bott, making it one of the most effective translation bridges between the research world and the daily realities of Australian school leaders. Her 2025 episode on switching off in the digital age directly addressed one of the most chronic sustainability problems in the profession: the structural near-impossibility of principals genuinely disconnecting from their role.

26. Brad Gaynor, Catholic Education ACG

Brad Gaynor is School Performance and Development Leader for the Catholic Education Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn, a former primary school principal of over 20 years, past President of the Australian Catholic Primary Principals Association (2018 to 2021), Board Director of APPA (2011 to 2021), and author of From Burnout to Breakthrough: The Leadership Reset (Routledge, 2025).

His book introduces the RESET Framework, a practical model mapping leadership recovery across four phases: Recognition, Reflection, Realignment, and Reinvention. Described by reviewers as "a powerful, heartfelt guide that transforms personal struggle into a practical framework for sustainable leadership," the book is the most directly principal-facing text on burnout prevention and recovery to have emerged from the Australian education context. He was a speaker at the 2026 APPA National Conference in Canberra.

The Structural Reform Voices

These nine researchers examine the systemic and policy conditions that make the principalship sustainable or unsustainable.

27. Prof. Amanda Keddie, Monash University

Amanda Keddie is Professor of Education at Monash University and a co-investigator on the Invisible Labour project. Her research examines the relationship between education policy, equity, and the working conditions of teachers and school leaders, with a particular focus on how accountability and autonomy interact in practice.

Keddie's contribution to the principal burnout conversation is specifically about the structural design of school systems. Her research challenges the narrative that the current crisis is simply a temporary response to workload intensification, arguing instead that accountability-heavy, under-resourced public school systems produce burnout as a predictable structural outcome. Her work on emotional labour draws on practice theory and feminist scholarship to understand why the invisible and uncompensated emotional work of school leaders is so persistently absent from policy and job design.

28. Dr Christine Grice, University of Auckland

Christine Grice is a Senior Lecturer in Educational Leadership at the University of Sydney, co-investigator on the Invisible Labour project, and a researcher whose work focuses on educational leadership for social justice in the New Zealand and Australian contexts. She has published on principal leadership, school autonomy, and the sustainability of the principalship in high-complexity school environments.

Grice's inclusion as a chief investigator on the Invisible Labour project alongside the Monash and Deakin teams brings the University of Sydney perspective to the most significant qualitative study of principal emotional labour yet produced in Australia. Her research draws on practice theory to examine how school autonomy reforms intersect with the emotional and relational demands of school leadership, contributing a distinct analytical lens to the broader evidence base for structural reform.

29. Prof. Jo Lampert, Monash University

Jo Lampert is Professor of Teacher Education for Social Transformation at Monash University and Co-leader of the Education Workforce for the Future Impact Lab alongside Fiona Longmuir. She has spent 25 years researching how teachers and school leaders can be prepared to address educational inequalities in hard-to-staff schools.

Lampert's research is critical to the principal burnout conversation because she focuses specifically on the amplified pressures that principal sustainability faces in high-needs schools. Her 2024 work on teacher retention in challenging contexts, in collaboration with the Australian Education Union, identifies the interconnections between teacher workload, principal leadership capacity, and school community support as mutually reinforcing factors that cannot be addressed in isolation.

30. Helen Goode, University of Melbourne

Helen Goode is a Lecturer in the Master of Education (Leadership and Management) and Master of Instructional Leadership programs at the University of Melbourne, and a member of David Gurr's educational leadership research group. Her research interests include the sustainability of successful leadership, leadership preparation, development and retention, and the role of coaching in building leadership capacity.

Goode's contribution is particularly significant in the space of leadership preparation and transition. Her 2025 chapter on preparing for principalship in the Aotearoa New Zealand context, published in a Springer volume on educational leadership, examines how mentoring and coaching structures can be designed to reduce early career burnout risk. Her work directly addresses the one-in-five-quit-within-a-year statistic in New Zealand and similar early attrition patterns in Australia.

31. Dr Kim Allen, Monash University

Kim Allen is a researcher at Monash University whose work sits at the intersection of school leadership, student wellbeing, and the psychosocial conditions that enable or inhibit sustainable practice. She has collaborated on multiple Monash Education Workforce for the Future projects and has contributed to the Invisible Labour research program.

Allen's contribution to the principal burnout field includes research on how the social and belonging dimensions of school community interact with leadership sustainability. Her work challenges a purely individual or structural analysis by examining how the relational fabric of a school, its sense of connection and shared purpose, shapes the emotional demands placed on principals as the person at the centre of that relational web.

32. A/Prof. Michelle Striepe, Edith Cowan University

Michelle Striepe is Associate Professor in the School of Education at Edith Cowan University and a researcher in school leadership with particular focus on how leaders in Australasia navigate crisis and build community resilience. Her 2025 paper in School Leadership and Management, co-authored with David Gurr, Fiona Longmuir, and others, examined lessons from Australasian principals' experiences with crises.

Striepe's research is significant for what it reveals about the relationship between crisis leadership and principal burnout. Her analysis found that years of experience did not necessarily protect school leaders from the burnout and exhaustion that crises produce, challenging the assumption that more experienced principals are more resilient. This has direct implications for how support systems should be designed across the full career span, not only for early career principals.

33. Dr Marcus Horwood, Deakin University

Marcus Horwood is a researcher in the Educator Health and Wellbeing team at Deakin University whose research focuses on the psychology of school leadership, with particular attention to passion, burnout, and job satisfaction. His 2022 paper co-authored with Phil Riley, Herb Marsh, and Theresa Dicke, "Burning Passion, Burning Out: The Passionate School Principal, Burnout, Job Satisfaction, and Extending the Dualistic Model of Passion," examined how school leaders' passion for their work can be a double-edged sword.

The study, drawing on a longitudinal sample of 3,996 school leaders, found that school principals paradoxically report high levels of both burnout and job satisfaction, with harmonious passion protecting wellbeing while obsessive passion intensifying burnout risk. Horwood's research provides a nuanced psychological understanding of why principals so often remain committed to work that is simultaneously depleting them, an insight that has important implications for how support systems are designed and communicated.

34. Prof. Hernan Cuervo, University of Melbourne

Hernan Cuervo is Professor at the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne and Associate Editor of The Australian Educational Researcher. His research interests include teachers' work and lives, rural education, and theory of justice. His 2025 paper on teacher retention and attrition in Australia examined why teachers leave and their post-teaching pathways, finding that teaching labour conditions and their impact on wellbeing "contribute to the crisis of teachers' shortages in Australian schools."

Cuervo's contribution to the principal burnout field is his focus on rural and remote school leadership. His research amplifies an underrepresented dimension of the principal wellbeing crisis: principals in rural, remote, and isolated communities face compounding pressures around resource scarcity, community complexity, and geographic isolation that intensify the structural pressures documented in broader longitudinal surveys.

35. Dr Beverley Gallo Cordoba, Monash University

Beverley Gallo Cordoba is a researcher at Monash University and a contributor to the Invisible Labour project, with expertise in the social and cultural dimensions of school leadership and educator identity. Her research examines how community context, policy environment, and professional identity shape the experience of school leaders, particularly those working in high-complexity environments.

Gallo Cordoba's specific contribution is to the understanding of how principals in marginalised or high-need school communities carry a distinctive and heavier form of emotional labour. Her co-authored work with Kim Allen, Lucas Walsh, and others brings precision to the equity dimension of principal burnout that is often absent from population-level survey data, documenting how structural under-resourcing amplifies the emotional demands of leadership.

The Prevention Architects

These five people are building the practical tools, platforms, and frameworks that help school leaders identify and address burnout before it becomes a departure statistic.

36. Dr Helena Granziera, UNSW

Helena Granziera is Lecturer in the School of Education at UNSW and lead researcher of the 2025 study that became one of the most widely cited pieces of Australian education research that year. The study surveyed nearly 5,000 Australian teachers and found that 90 per cent experienced severe stress, with depression and anxiety at three times the national norm.

Granziera's framing of the problem is explicit and structural: "This is not just a wellbeing issue, it's a workforce issue." Her research has direct implications for school leaders because it documents the conditions of the workforce that principals are required to lead and support, even as they experience analogous pressures themselves. A former health education teacher and NSW primary school teacher for eight years, she brings both research and practitioner perspectives to a conversation that often lacks one or the other.

37. Prof. Andrew Martin, UNSW

Andrew Martin is Scientia Professor at the School of Education at UNSW and one of the world's most cited educational psychologists. His research on motivation, engagement, academic buoyancy, and adaptability in students and teachers has produced practical frameworks widely used across Australian schools.

His work is relevant to the principal burnout conversation because his research on teacher motivation and adaptability provides the theoretical underpinning for many of the wellbeing practices that schools use to prevent burnout in both teachers and leaders. Martin has co-authored research with Rebecca Collie and Helena Granziera that connects teacher wellbeing, teaching practices, and student outcomes, building the evidence chain that makes the case for system-level investment in educator wellbeing.

38. Ellen Ronalds Keene, Self-Care for Teachers

Ellen Ronalds Keene is a former high school teacher, wellbeing coach, and founder of Self-Care for Teachers, an online wellbeing hub for educators that has grown from a Facebook support group into a podcast, coaching practice, and resource library. She hosts the Teacher Wellbeing podcast, now in its tenth season, and runs the Beyond Teacher Wellbeing webinar series for Australian educators.

Ronalds Keene's contribution is as a communication and community bridge. Her podcast has reached a cumulative audience across Australia of tens of thousands of teachers and school leaders, many of whom encounter her work precisely when they most need both practical help and professional community. Her 2026 focus word "tend," chosen to describe the kind of sustained, attentive practice that prevents burnout, captures the ethos of an approach that takes sustainability seriously as a daily practice rather than an occasional event.

39. Daniela Falecki, Teacher Wellbeing

Daniela Falecki is the founder of Teacher Wellbeing, an organisation that has supported over 7,000 educators across more than 1,000 schools. A former teacher and NSW Director of Outdoor Education with over 25 years of experience, she holds a Master of Education (Leadership), is a licensed Mental Toughness practitioner and Executive Coach, and is affiliated with the International Coach Federation and International Positive Psychology Association.

Her book Thrive (Corwin, 2022) argues that teacher wellbeing requires moving beyond resilience training to address the systemic conditions that produce burnout. Named Lecturer of the Year at Sydney University in 2014, her work with school communities focuses on the structural, not just individual, dimensions of sustainable practice. She has been a consistently active voice on teacher wellbeing in the Australian context and a regular contributor to the national conversation on what schools need to build genuinely sustaining workplaces.

40. Dan Haesler, Komo

Dan Haesler is a Performance and Leadership Coach and Director of Cut Through Coaching, and one of the most widely recognised voices on educator wellbeing, purpose, and motivation across the Australian and New Zealand education landscape. He is a speaker, author, and facilitator who has worked with hundreds of schools across both countries.

Haesler's contribution to the principal burnout conversation is specifically in the translation space: taking the research on motivation, purpose, and occupational wellbeing and making it actionable for school leaders who do not have time to read academic journals. His coaching work with schools and organisations across Australia focuses on the conditions of motivation, purpose, and wellbeing that allow leaders to sustain high performance without burning out.

The New Zealand Community Voices

These five voices are specifically embedded in the New Zealand education landscape, addressing the distinct structural, cultural, and policy dimensions of principal sustainability in Aotearoa.

41. Mary Chamberlain, NZEI Te Riu Roa

Mary Chamberlain is a senior figure at NZEI Te Riu Roa, the New Zealand Educational Institute, which has been one of the primary advocacy organisations for school principal wellbeing in New Zealand for decades. The NZEI's 2016 Principal Health and Wellbeing Survey established the evidence base that has shaped principal wellbeing advocacy in New Zealand ever since, finding that 72 per cent of New Zealand principals worked more than 51 hours per week.

Chamberlain's ongoing advocacy work at NZEI focuses on the intersection of workload, system reform, and the cultural and bicultural dimensions of principal sustainability in Aotearoa. The NZEI's partnership with Deakin University's principal wellbeing research team ensures that New Zealand data is collected and analysed with the same longitudinal rigour applied in Australia, producing a cross-Tasman evidence base that is genuinely comparative.

42. Dr Christine Cunningham, Edith Cowan University

Christine Cunningham is Associate Professor in the School of Education at Edith Cowan University with research interests in school leadership, principalship, and sustainability. She is a co-author on the 2025 School Leadership and Management paper on Australasian principals' experiences with crisis, alongside Michelle Striepe, David Gurr, and Fiona Longmuir.

Cunningham's work is positioned at the intersection of Australasian comparative research, examining how similar structural pressures manifest differently in Australian and New Zealand school contexts. Her contribution to the cross-Tasman dialogue on principal sustainability is significant precisely because her ECU position bridges the Western Australian perspective with the broader national and international literature, bringing diversity of context to a conversation that can sometimes be dominated by eastern seaboard experience.

43. Dr Sylvia Robertson, University of Otago

Sylvia Robertson is a Researcher in the College of Education at the University of Otago and co-author of the 2025 study on Australasian principals' experiences with crises. Her research focuses on school leadership in New Zealand, with attention to how context, culture, and community shape the experience of principalship in Aotearoa.

Robertson's New Zealand-based perspective is particularly important for understanding how the specific conditions of the New Zealand principal workforce, including the legacy of Tomorrow's Schools, the work of NZPF, and the bicultural dimensions of leading in Aotearoa, intersect with the broader Australasian burnout narrative. Her participation in cross-Tasman collaborative research ensures that New Zealand experience is not subsumed into a purely Australian analysis.

44. Prof. Viviane Robinson, University of Auckland

Viviane Robinson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Auckland and Visiting Professor at University College London, having devoted her career to investigating and developing the capabilities leaders need to work productively with their teachers to improve the wellbeing and achievement of their students. As Academic Director of the University of Auckland's Centre for Educational Leadership for eight years, she was instrumental in delivering the national induction programme for new school leaders across New Zealand.

Her 2023 book Virtuous Educational Leadership: Doing the Right Work the Right Way (Corwin) extends her foundational work on student-centred leadership by addressing the aspects of leadership character required for excellent and sustainable performance of the role. Robinson's influence on New Zealand school leadership development has been so substantial that her frameworks continue to shape how principals are prepared, inducted, and supported across both the New Zealand and Australian systems.

45. A/Prof. Claire Sinnema, University of Auckland

Claire Sinnema is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Auckland. Her research focuses on educational improvement across strands including educational leadership, curriculum, practitioner inquiry, and standards. Her published 2022 paper The Power of School Conditions, co-authored with Rachel Cann, Alan Daly, and others, specifically examined individual, relational, and organisational influences on educator wellbeing in New Zealand schools.

Sinnema's contribution to the principal burnout field is her focus on how whole-school conditions, rather than individual traits or isolated programmes, shape the wellbeing of educators including leaders. Her research on professional networks and collaborative conditions for teacher growth provides insight into the relational structures that allow principals to both receive and offer the kind of professional support that makes sustainable leadership possible.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

The list above deliberately moved past the most prominent household names in leadership to surface fresher voices. That editing choice means some significant contributors did not make the final 45.

Dr Amanda Heffernan, now Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester, produced landmark research on Australian principal attraction and retention in partnership with ASPA, and her findings on why Australian principals leave before retirement remain among the most precise available. Her current UK-based role placed her outside the geographic scope of this list, but her research is essential reading for anyone working on this problem.

Kirstin Ferguson is one of Australia's most prominent leadership authors and a keynote speaker at principal conferences nationally, including the 2025 APPA National Conference. As a Thinkers50-ranked leadership expert, however, her contribution to the specific field of principal burnout and sustainability is as a general leadership practitioner rather than as a principal burnout specialist, which placed her outside the criteria for this particular list.

Tim Delany is a doctoral researcher at Monash University simultaneously working as a Research Fellow on the principal emotional labour project. A former teacher, principal, and AEU unionist with 25 years in the Australian public system, Delany represents the practitioner-researcher bridge that this field needs more of. As his career and published record develops, he is a voice worth watching closely.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

One of the most persistent errors in how organisations respond to principal burnout is treating it as an individual problem with individual solutions. When a principal burns out, the instinct is often to offer them personal support, a coaching programme, a mindfulness course, or a period of sick leave. These responses can be genuinely helpful. They are not, however, solutions. They are responses to a symptom that will recur as long as the underlying structural conditions persist.

The research is now sufficiently developed to make the structural case plainly. The top stressors in the ACU survey have held the same positions for fifteen consecutive years: sheer quantity of work and lack of time to focus on teaching and learning. If fifteen years of longitudinal data tracking the same causes have not changed the conditions, the explanation is not that principals need more resilience training. The explanation is that the system has not yet been sufficiently redesigned.

A second common mistake is confusing advocacy with action. Peak bodies, researchers, and practitioners have done exceptional work building the evidence base and making the case for change. But the evidence base is now robust enough that continuing to add evidence in the absence of structural reform is producing diminishing returns. The gap between what is known and what has been implemented is the urgent problem of this moment.

A third error is treating principal wellbeing as separable from teacher wellbeing and student wellbeing. The research is consistent: when principals thrive, their staff are better supported, and when their staff are better supported, students achieve better outcomes. These are not separate levers. They are the same lever. Any organisation that invests in student wellbeing programmes while neglecting the conditions that sustain the leaders who implement those programmes is working against itself.

A fourth mistake, specific to the New Zealand context, is assuming that the Tomorrow's Schools structural isolation is a fixed feature of the system rather than a policy choice that can be unmade. Bali Haque and others have argued consistently that the levels of support available to New Zealand principals are a policy design problem, not an inevitability, and that Australia's more centralised support structures, despite their own inadequacies, demonstrate that alternatives exist.

Finally, there is the mistake of focusing only on the leaders who are already in crisis. The most important returns in this field come from prevention and from early structural intervention, not from rescue. Building systems in which principals are sustainably supported from day one of their principalship, and in which that support is normalised and expected rather than stigmatised, is the work that needs to happen before the next cohort of principals burns out.

Implementation Guide: Building Your Engagement with This Field

If you are a school principal or system leader looking to engage with the voices on this list, the most direct starting point is the research produced by the ACU and Deakin teams. The annual Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey, available at healthandwellbeing.org, is the most comprehensive public tracking of the crisis and its trends. Reading the most recent report before engaging with any of the advocacy or practitioner voices on this list will give you a shared evidence base for those conversations.

For New Zealand-specific context, the NZPF's Roadmap to Sustainable Principal Leadership and the NZEI's wellbeing resources provide the policy framework within which the NZ voices on this list operate. Understanding that framework makes the advocacy of Leanne Otene and others more concrete and more actionable.

For immediate practical tools, the wellbeing practitioners on this list have built accessible entry points. The Wellbeing Distillery's swOS framework and the NZIWR's whole-school wellbeing resources are both free to explore and grounded in the same research evidence cited throughout this list. The podcast ecosystem, including The School of Wellbeing with Meg Durham, the Well-Led Schools podcast with Adrienne Hornby, and the Teacher Wellbeing podcast with Ellen Ronalds Keene, provides ongoing access to both the research and the practitioner conversations in a format that fits into the commute, the exercise session, or the quiet moments between meetings.

For leadership teams working on school culture and team dynamics, a practical next step alongside engaging with this research is building the communication and accountability foundations that allow leadership teams to share load effectively and to have the honest conversations about sustainability that the research suggests are so often missing. Jonno White works with school leadership teams across Australia and internationally on exactly these foundations. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

For more on the strategies that can protect school leaders from safety hazards that compound burnout, read "17 Essential Strategies for Principal Safety at Work" at consultclarity.org/post/strategies-principal-safety.

If you are looking to improve the broader culture and wellbeing ecosystem of your school, the list of school culture and wellbeing consultants at consultclarity.org/post/school-culture-wellbeing-consultants provides a complementary directory of practitioners.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the leading researchers on principal burnout in Australia?

The leading researchers in Australia are clustered primarily at three institutions. At ACU, Professor Theresa Dicke now leads the 15-year longitudinal Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey, which was founded by Professor Phil Riley, now at Deakin University. At Deakin, Dr Ben Arnold and Dr Mark Rahimi continue the educator health and wellbeing research program. At Monash, Professor Jane Wilkinson, Professor Lucas Walsh, and Dr Fiona Longmuir lead the Invisible Labour project. At UNSW, A/Prof. Rebecca Collie and Dr Helena Granziera produce research on teacher and leader wellbeing from an educational psychology perspective.

What does the research say about how many Australian principals experience burnout?

The ACU survey, tracking over 7,000 school leaders over 15 years, found that in 2025 nearly half of principals reported experiencing physical violence, more than half faced threats of violence, 10.3 per cent recorded severe anxiety scores, and more than half seriously considered leaving their current job. Almost one-third of Australian school leaders frequently experience symptoms of burnout according to the 10-year longitudinal data published by Arnold and Rahimi in 2025.

How was this list compiled?

Every person on this list was selected against three criteria: a documented contribution to the understanding, advocacy, or practice of principal wellbeing and sustainability in the Australian or New Zealand context; active engagement in the field as of 2025 or 2026; and a balance of researchers, peak body leaders, and practitioners. The list deliberately moved past the most prominent household names to include researchers, mid-tier practitioners, and New Zealand voices that may be less familiar across the Tasman.

Can I hire someone to facilitate leadership and team wellbeing workshops or sessions for my school?

Yes. Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who works with school leadership teams on the communication, accountability, and team dynamics foundations that underpin sustainable leadership practice. He works with schools around the world and regularly travels for facilitation engagements. International travel is often far more affordable than organisations expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why does principal burnout matter for student outcomes?

The research is consistent. When principals burn out, leave, or become depleted, the consequences run through to every teacher in the building and every student in every classroom. Studies cited by Rebecca Collie, Andrew Martin, and the broader UNSW team establish clear connections between teacher wellbeing, teaching quality, and student outcomes. The ACU survey has consistently found that principal health and wellbeing is the canary in the coal mine for school health overall. A school whose principal is operating at sustained depletion cannot build the kind of teacher support, professional culture, and community trust that student outcomes depend on.

Is principal burnout different in New Zealand from Australia?

The structural drivers are similar: workload intensification, administrative burden, responsibility for complex social needs without adequate systemic support, and insufficient time to focus on the core work of instructional leadership. What differs is the policy context. New Zealand's Tomorrow's Schools model created a structural isolation for principals that is more pronounced than in Australia's more centralised state systems. New Zealand principals also carry specific pressures around bicultural education requirements and curriculum reform. The NZ PPTA, NZPF, and NZEI have all produced specific research and advocacy in the New Zealand context that reflects these distinct pressures.

Final Thoughts

The 45 voices on this list represent a field that has moved from problem identification to problem diagnosis and is now, frustratingly slowly, beginning to make progress on structural solutions. The research base that Phil Riley and the ACU team began building in 2011 has produced 15 years of longitudinal evidence. The Invisible Labour project has given that data a human face that is hard to look away from. The peak bodies have found their voice and their alignment. The practitioners have built tools that work.

What the field needs now, most urgently, is not more evidence. It is structural implementation at the government and system level that takes the evidence seriously. Dicke's framing is right: the solution is redesigning what principals are asked to do, resourcing it properly, and removing work that does not contribute to student learning and safety. That is a political and policy challenge as much as it is a professional development challenge.

For every school leader reading this list: the work of following these voices, reading this research, and applying these tools matters. But the system change that will make your role genuinely sustainable requires the advocacy that the peak bodies and researchers on this list are conducting. Supporting that advocacy, adding your voice to it, and making it visible to the system leaders who can act on it is part of the work.

And while you wait for that system change, the practical, structural, relational work of building a genuinely sustainable leadership practice within your school is worth doing. It protects you. It protects your team. It sets the culture for the leaders who will come after you.

Jonno White, Founder of Consult Clarity, is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected. To book Jonno for your next leadership workshop, team offsite, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read: 25 Crucial Fixes for School Leadership Pipeline Collapse

The evidence is clear: the principalship as currently designed in most school systems is not sustainable for most people. A Gallup survey cited in multiple studies found principals were working on average 62 hours per week. The school leadership pipeline is not just under pressure. In many systems around the world, it is collapsing from both ends simultaneously, and most of the people responsible for fixing it are too exhausted to know where to start.

Keep reading: consultclarity.org/post/school-leadership-pipeline-collapse