ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what culture is, what it means and how important it is to a happy and emotionally healthy working environment. This chapter gives a brief outline of the emergence of culture as a human resource management (HRM) responsibility during the 1980s and the tangible and intangible HRM processes that can shape employee behaviour. This chapter discusses whether culture can be managed and how successful management of culture is key to successful innovation. This chapter explores what school culture is and how it can be identified by looking at Schein’s model (1985) as a means to explore the three layers of culture: basic underlying assumptions; espoused values; and artefacts and symbols. Examples of organisation cultural changed are explored through recent examples of cultural change and the emotional and financial cost of bad culture. Abuse of culture is addressed through examples of schools that were part of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse and how an established culture could hide the horrors of what was happening within the school. The chapter finishes with a description of what an ideal school culture should be like and how the three-stage lesson observation programme can be used to transform school culture.
