School leadership in Australia is at a critical juncture, with growing challenges around staff wellbeing, student behaviour, and culture. Amid these pressures, Adam Voigt – a former principal and expert in school culture – offers a game-changing solution through his RP2.0 method.
Rooted in restorative practices, this approach empowers educators to build healthier, more productive school environments. Voigt, the author of Restoring Teaching and founder of Real Schools, has dedicated his career to reshaping leadership in education.
Voigt’s evidence-based strategies, now widely embraced by schools across Australia, are driving meaningful change in how school leaders foster engagement, collaboration, and student success.
Below, The Educator speaks to Voigt about the urgent challenges facing school leaders, the changes needed to improve principal wellbeing and retention, the misconceptions around student behaviour, and the transformative potential of RP2.0.
TE: Drawing from your extensive work with schools across Australia over the past year, what has been the state of play regarding principal health, wellbeing, and retention over the last 12 months?
Unfortunately, the data and the narrative about principal wellbeing isn’t improving. We’re continuing to see Principals leave the profession early, we’re seeing decreasing rates of Assistant/Deputy Principals aspiring to the big chair and we’re identifying ‘black spots’ in countless Australian regional, remote and low socio-economic where Principals just won’t go. Principals are reporting that their stressors are chiefly attached to unreasonable expectations that come from either the system or the community. They personally speak to an overwhelm in their job and that they’re struggling to overcome blame habits, punitive mindsets, student behaviour challenges, staff inconsistencies and adversarial parents. Mostly, they desperately miss being trusted to focus on purpose in their work and that administrative distractions are omnipresent.
TE: As we await the ACU’s upcoming report on principal occupational health and wellbeing, what do you believe needs to happen at a political and community level in 2025 to make a meaningful difference to principal health, wellbeing, and retention?
At a national policy level, it’s more critical than ever that the toxic elements of competition and comparison are removed from our national improvement agenda. Principals need to be supported far more than they need to be held accountable, and too many are experiencing daily, demoralising shame at the insistence that they never have sufficient enrolments, facilities, marketing, quality staff, student learning outcomes and parental support. Australia’s is now amongst the most inequitably funded education systems in the world, leaving our Principals in a metaphorical ‘survival of the fittest’ cage match with their colleagues. Great work in schools happens when Principal work is simplified and when they collaborate or share each other’s successes, not when they’re hoarding great approaches lest they lose market share.
TE: You’ve spoken about the importance of understanding students’ context and brain function to manage behaviour effectively. What’s a common misconception teachers have about student behaviour, and how can small shifts in approach lead to meaningful improvements?
Students (in fact, every single human on the planet) is wandering around in either a neo-cortex state, meaning they are thinking quite well, or a limbic state, which is when we’re emotional. When we’re too emotional, we don’t have access to our vocabulary, which is chiefly stored off in the neo-cortex. Practiced, simple language shifts will help teachers regulate their emotional responses and be calmer in the classroom. And that’s when they do their best work. As is emerging in some exciting research coming from the University of Virginia, it’s an investment in the social/emotional intelligence of the adults in the school that supports the strongest teaching responses, and thereby improves student behaviour most effectively. It’s high time we invested in our teachers this way.
TE: Your concept of RP2.0 certainly takes restorative practices to the next level! Can you tell our readers about which key improvements RP2.0 introduces, and how can it transform both student engagement and staff wellbeing in schools?
RP2.0 is a recognition that the research behind what many of us know as Restorative Practices (what I’d call RP1.0) is valid and valuable. It was just the model of implementation that needed upgrading for the context of a busy, evolving, contemporary Australian school. I researched the key drivers of any culture and they’re clearly Language (what’s said in the culture and how it’s said), Conduct (how we resolve conflict, deal with wrongdoing and cultivate learning) and Mindset (what the leaders have committed to as useful truths). Within each of these three domains, I have developed a suite of low-investment, high-return tactics and strategies that teachers can implement. Teacher can be confident that these strategies will actually make a difference, they can be taken to scale and they don’t require any more pointless mini-lessons or tiresome theme days. Teachers that we work with universally report that they’re simply more effective and less stressed when they bring RP2.0 into their daily work.