Working through the First Year of the Pandemic: A Snapshot of Australian School Leaders' Work Roles and Responsibilities and Health and Wellbeing during COVID-19

Over the last 18 months, the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has had dramatic implications for education systems across the globe. In Australia, state and territory governments have worked in consultation with one another and the federal government to respond to outbreaks. State-level policymakers have introduced the measures and policy directives that determine how schools operate during the pandemic. At the school level, Australian principals and school leaders were responsible for dealing with the disruption brought about by the pandemic and ensuring that policy directives were effectively implemented. The new circumstances presented school leaders with new challenges and in some cases radically transformed the school leadership role. In this article, the authors consider how Australian school leaders' work roles and health and wellbeing may have been impacted during 2020- the year that the COVID-19 pandemic wrought major disruption to Australian school systems. To achieve this, they draw on a pool of ten years of data from the Australian Principal Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey (APHSWS). This analysis is intended to provide a broad overview of general patterns in school leaders' work environments. Given the breadth of the data, the findings of this paper should be read with caution as key factors that would shape school leaders' experiences and outcomes (e.g. gender, role, location and sector) are beyond the scope of this paper.