Every school wants a positive culture. Celebrating success, recognising effort and keeping morale high are part of good leadership. But there is a version of positivity that does the opposite. It smiles through problems, closes down difficult conversations and treats honest concern as disloyalty. It feels supportive. It is actually a barrier to getting better.
That is toxic positivity, and international schools are especially vulnerable to it.
What toxic positivity looks like in a school
Toxic positivity is not optimism. Optimism looks honestly at a problem and believes it can be solved. Toxic positivity refuses to look at the problem at all. In schools, it tends to sound familiar:
- A concern raised in a meeting is met with “let’s focus on the positives.”
- Workload worries are answered with a wellbeing session rather than a change in workload.
- Data that tells an uncomfortable story is reframed until it tells a comfortable one.
- The colleague who asks the hard question is quietly labelled negative, not committed or “not a good fit.”
Psychologist Susan David has described this as a tyranny of positivity: a culture where only certain emotions are acceptable, so people learn to hide the rest. In a school, what gets hidden is usually the information leaders most need to hear.
What the research says
Toxic positivity began as a popular phrase, but researchers are now taking it seriously. A recent study in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology found that toxic positivity at work was linked to shame, emotional exhaustion and employees’ intentions to withdraw from their jobs. In other words, forced cheerfulness doesn’t just fail to help. It can push people towards the door.
In education specifically, Australian researchers studying teachers’ working conditions have described schools sidelining workplace stress by policing negative comments and ignoring difficult issues raised by staff, and offering self-care strategies in place of action on teachers’ real concerns. They argue that relentless positivity of this kind can do more harm than good.
Older organisational research points the same way. Elizabeth Morrison and Frances Milliken’s work on organisational silence showed how employees learn to withhold concerns when they believe speaking up is futile or risky, and how that silence slowly undermines an organisation’s ability to detect and correct problems. Chris Argyris described the “defensive routines” organisations use to avoid embarrassment or threat, which protect people in the short term while preventing learning. And Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety shows that teams improve when people believe they can raise problems without being punished or humiliated.
Andy Hargreaves gave schools a term for the polished version of this: contrived collegiality. It is the appearance of collaboration, arranged and managed from above, without the honest professional challenge that real collaboration requires.
Why international schools are vulnerable
Toxic positivity is not unique to international schools, but several features of the sector make it more likely:
- The school is also a business. Fee-paying families, marketing and competition create pressure to present a polished story, inside the school as well as outside it.
- Contracts and visas raise the stakes of speaking up. When your job, your housing and your right to stay in the country are linked, silence can feel like the safest option.
- Turnover is high. Leaders on short contracts may want a smooth narrative, and staff who are leaving soon may decide a difficult conversation isn’t worth it.
- Accreditation and inspection reward a good story. Self-studies and visits can encourage schools to present strengths and soften weaknesses rather than examine them.
When people have never seen good
One of the hardest forms of toxic positivity is not deliberate at all. It comes from leaders or staff who have never worked somewhere that does things well, so they genuinely believe what they have is good.
Ecologists call this shifting baseline syndrome. The marine biologist Daniel Pauly used it to describe how each generation of scientists treated the fish stocks they first encountered as normal, without realising how much had already been lost. Schools can work the same way. If you have only seen one model of planning, feedback or behaviour, it becomes your baseline. A colleague who has seen something better and says so can sound negative, even arrogant, when they are actually offering a benchmark.
Diane Vaughan’s research on the Challenger disaster described a related idea, the normalisation of deviance: small departures from good practice that become accepted because nothing terrible happens straight away. In schools, the consequences are slower and quieter, but they are real. Students learn less than they could, and good staff stop trying to change things.
The fair point here is that this is rarely malicious. People can’t value what they have never experienced. But it does mean that the person raising a concern is often the person with the widest frame of reference, and that is exactly the voice a school should want to hear.
Honesty is an act of loyalty
In his new book, Vibe, Adam Grant makes a distinction that applies directly to schools. In unhealthy relationships, people feel forced to choose between honesty and loyalty, so they bite their tongues to protect fragile ties. In healthy relationships, honesty is itself a form of loyalty: people speak up because they want things to improve.
Grant is equally clear that the goal is not brutal honesty. The aim is to be as clear as possible in what we say and as caring as possible in how we say it. Kim Scott makes a similar point in Radical Candor, where she warns against “ruinous empathy”: being so concerned with being nice that we fail to tell people what they need to hear. Nice and kind are not the same thing.
What leaders can do
- Separate optimism from avoidance. Acknowledge the problem first, then talk about what is possible. Hope that skips the first step isn’t hope.
- Thank the person who raises the issue. How a leader responds to the first concern decides whether there will be a second.
- Act on what you hear. A wellbeing initiative is not a substitute for fixing the cause of stress.
- Look outward for benchmarks. Visit other schools, invite external review, and value staff who bring experience from elsewhere.
- Build safe routes for honesty. Anonymous surveys, structured protocols and regular “what isn’t working?” conversations make candour normal rather than brave.
- Model it yourself. When leaders name their own mistakes, others feel safer naming theirs.
What staff can do
- Lead with shared purpose. Frame concerns around students and outcomes, not personal frustration.
- Bring evidence and an alternative. “Here’s what I’ve seen work elsewhere” lands better than “this isn’t good enough.”
- Stay positive about people while being honest about practice. Candour about the work is easier to hear when respect for the person is clear.
- Find allies. A concern raised by several colleagues is harder to dismiss as one person’s negativity.
Positive is not the same as good
Schools need positivity. They need people who believe in students, celebrate progress and keep going when things are hard. But a culture that only allows good news isn’t positive. It’s fragile.
The schools that improve are not the ones where everyone agrees that everything is fine. They are the ones where someone can say “this isn’t working yet” and be thanked for it.
