The Well-being of Teachers: Work Environment at Mariendal Friskole, a Self-governing Primary School

Abstract

In recent years the public school system of Denmark has been subject to a large number of reforms from the governmental level that, among other things, have diminished the autonomy of a number of schools to make private decisions on how to organize and prioritize. It seems large numbers of teachers are unhappy with the current conditions of their workplace, and a relatively high number of teachers are becoming seriously ill due to what seems to be a poor work environment. Based on qualitative interview data, primary and second-hand data, and a hermeneutic framework, the authors set out to investigate the functionalities and dysfunctionalities of the structure of a free school, more specifically, Mariendal Friskole. The school lies in the heart of Copenhagen, and have not been subject to the reforms. The authors investigate the particular way of organizing at Mariendal Friskole in relation to particular aspects of the work environment such as leadership, meaningfulness, habits and predictability, and social support, etc. Hereafter, they move on to speculate on what practical problems and conflicts might surface if one wanted to implement the specific structural model of Mariendal Friskole to other schools within the public school system. The authors conclude that one encounters specific problems in attempting to scale some aspects of the structural conditions that make room for the work environment for teachers of a free school, while others can, principally, be scaled less problematically.