Safety climate in learning environments: a staff-centred analysis of comprehensive schools

Providing students with equal learning opportunities to enhance their well-being and the good learning outcomes required by the curriculum in a safe and secure learning environment is a basic task of school staff. However, staff perceptions of the safety climate (SC) in schools remain understudied. Also, previous studies on safety culture recommend schools develop their safety management and expertise as well as community-based operating models. Thus, we examine school staff’s perceptions of SC, or the safety-related conceptions, attitudes and beliefs shared by the members of a community. This study answers the following research questions: (1) What is the level of SC in learning environments as perceived by comprehensive education school staff? and (2) Are there differences in the perceived SC of different comprehensive education schools? We aim to engage the scholarly community in greater discourse on SC as a perception of safety culture in schools. Our statistical analyses show that staff perceptions (N = 549) of SC in learning environments are positive on average. There are moderate and statistically significant differences between schools, and some large and statistically very significant differences between schools regarding how the staff of a particular school evaluates their own SC. This result stands in contrast to those of earlier school safety culture studies. In the future, SC should be considered from both staff’s and students’ perspectives and in terms of safety.