About Tara Elie

Why staff mattering is the missing piece in school improvement

A practical guide for school leaders on how staff mattering shapes culture, wellbeing, retention, inclusion and everyday leadership in schools

School improvement conversations often focus on strategy, systems, attendance, behaviour, curriculum and outcomes. Those things matter. But many schools still struggle because the adults inside the system do not consistently experience something more basic: the felt sense that they matter.

When staff feel peripheral, unseen or only noticed when something goes wrong, culture starts to thin out. Meetings become performative. Collaboration becomes cautious. Wellbeing initiatives feel cosmetic. Retention becomes harder because people do not simply leave workload; they also leave environments where they feel emotionally detached from the life of the school.

This is why staff mattering deserves much more attention from leaders.

Mattering is not the same as praise. It is not a poster campaign, a one-off wellbeing week or a set of values displayed in reception. Mattering is communicated through daily leadership behaviour: how people are welcomed, how their voices are heard, how mistakes are handled, how contribution is recognised, how decisions are explained and how support is offered when someone is struggling.

Tara Elie's research places the psychology of mattering, belonging and relational practice at the heart of leadership, keynote speaking and professional development for adults who support children and young people. That lens is useful because it explains why apparently small moments in schools can have outsized cultural impact.

A rushed induction tells a new member of staff that they are expected to cope alone. A defensive line-manager conversation tells someone that image matters more than honesty. A culture where some voices carry more weight than others sends a message about whose experience counts. Over time, staff read these moments and decide whether this is a place where they can contribute, grow and stay.

For school leaders, the practical question is not whether mattering sounds important. It is how mattering shows up in the routines and relationships of the school.

Here are five places to start.

1. Treat onboarding as a culture signal

The first weeks of a person’s experience tell them what belonging will feel like later. If onboarding is fragmented, transactional or overly procedural, people infer that support will always be patchy. Strong onboarding does more than explain systems. It helps someone understand how the school works relationally, where to ask for help, how decisions get made and how they can be fully part of the community.

2. Move wellbeing from offer to environment

Wellbeing cannot sit only in support packages, resilience sessions or reminders to take care. Staff wellbeing is shaped by whether people can speak honestly, whether workload conversations are realistic, whether leaders respond with curiosity rather than judgement and whether trust exists in everyday interactions. Tara’s public offer already links teacher wellbeing to belonging and emotionally safe environments. That is the shift many schools need.

3. Make inclusion visible in adult culture

Schools often talk thoughtfully about student belonging while paying less attention to staff experience. Yet adult culture sets the emotional tone of the organisation. Inclusive leadership is made visible when meetings are facilitated well, difficult topics are not avoided, people are not punished for raising concern and difference is engaged with maturity rather than discomfort.

4. Replace performance-only recognition with contribution awareness

Many staff are high-performing and still feel unseen. That happens when recognition is reserved for visible wins rather than the quieter labour that sustains a school: mentoring a colleague, calming a tense parent interaction, noticing a pupil’s change in mood, carrying emotional weight for a team or helping a new member of staff settle. When leaders notice contribution, they reinforce mattering.

5. Build relational practice into leadership habits

Relational practice is often misunderstood as softness. In reality it is one of the strongest levers for trust, accountability and culture. Staff are more able to hear challenge, recover from mistakes and stay committed to collective goals when they experience leadership as respectful, emotionally intelligent and grounded in relationship

What staff mattering changes

When people feel they matter, several shifts become more possible:

• Honest communication becomes easier.
• Support is sought earlier.
• Collaboration strengthens.
• New staff settle faster.
• Inclusion work becomes more credible.
• Retention improves because people are attached to the culture, not just the role.

None of this removes structural pressure in education. Schools are still working in demanding conditions. But staff mattering changes how pressure is carried. It creates the relational conditions that make challenge more sustainable.

Questions for leaders

A useful starting point is to ask:

• What does a new member of staff learn about belonging in their first month here?
• In this school, when do people feel most visible and least visible?
• Are our wellbeing efforts changing experience or mainly adding initiatives?
• Whose voices are easy to hear in our culture, and whose are easiest to miss?
• What do our daily leadership habits communicate about who matters here?

School improvement is not only a technical project. It is also a relational one. When leaders focus on staff mattering, they do not move away from performance. They strengthen the conditions that make meaningful, sustainable performance possible.

Call to action

If your school or trust is exploring staff belonging, teacher wellbeing, relational practice or inclusive leadership, Tara Elie offers keynotes, CPD, consultancy and coaching designed to help adults in education build cultures where people feel they matter.

Book a call with Tara here

Belonging has always been at the heart of Tara Elie’s work—first as a student, then as a teacher, and now as a coach, psychologist and educator of educators.

When Tara first entered the classroom as an NQT, she was welcomed with open arms. She was treated as a gift to the profession—nurtured, encouraged and given the space to thrive. She progressed quickly, took on leadership responsibilities early, and flourished in a culture of unity and support.

But she also knows the other side of education. She has worked in schools where she felt unseen, where her contributions were undervalued and her wellbeing sidelined. In every instance, the difference wasn’t the demographic of the students or the challenges of the community—it was the culture. The leadership. The climate of trust, or the lack of it. The difference between “we’re in this together” and “you’re on your own.”

Tara knows, from lived experience, that a day in the classroom can be exhilarating and emotional—but it can also be exhausting, demoralising and even humiliating. She knows that leading teams can feel thankless when kindness is perceived as weakness, and where nurture is treated as a risk—particularly in secondary settings.

That’s why she pursued a Master’s degree in Positive Psychology and Coaching Psychology—to find evidence-based, practical ways to support all adults in education, no matter their role, experience or setting. Her work is now grounded in the science of mattering—the idea that people thrive when they feel significant, noticed, and valued.

Tara is passionate about helping leaders onboard staff well, creating emotionally safe environments where teachers feel secure enough to be relational—not punitive. She challenges the perception that compassion is soft and instead shows how belonging is not just beneficial—it’s vital to the success of any school culture.

Her mission is to:

• Help leaders embed cultures where belonging is a      strategy, not a slogan.
• Support schools to provide true value for money—not      just in performance outcomes, but in staff wellbeing and long-term      sustainability.
• Empower all adults—whether parents, pastoral staff,      headteachers or social workers—to feel confident, supported and      emotionally equipped to do the job they came into the profession to do.
• Redefine staff wellbeing as a professional      priority, not a personal indulgence.

At the heart of everything she does is the unwavering belief that when adults matter, they can change lives.

Tara is dedicated to improving the lived experience of adults who work with young people in every capacity—because when they are supported, valued and emotionally safe, everything changes.