One of the most popular terms in education leadership is “psychological safety”.

It appears in strategy documents, staff briefings and professional development sessions, often framed as a defining feature of healthy school culture.

Yet despite its ubiquitous nature, many schools struggle to translate it into lived reality - and in many cases, its meaning has morphed into being seen as being about simply keeping people comfortable.

This in turn can translate into a belief that challenge, disagreement or professional tension are to be avoided and that leaders should avoid difficult conversations, soften accountability or discourage dissent to “protect wellbeing”.

Meaningful growth involves discomfort

But a culture where everyone agrees, or appears to, is not necessarily a safe one. It may simply be a quiet one because staff have learned which topics are safe and which are not, and that speaking out is not worth the issues it causes.

In reality, the true meaning of psychological safety does not mean the absence of discomfort. In fact, meaningful professional growth almost always involves discomfort.

What psychological safety really means, as research by Amy Edmondson makes clear, is feeling comfortable with interpersonal risk-taking.

It is the confidence to speak honestly, ask questions, admit uncertainty or challenge decisions without fear of humiliation or retaliation. That leaders will listen, reflect, consider and admit to being wrong, without fear of consequences.

Actively inviting challenge

I experienced this first-hand during the early days of my international career when working with a secondary head in Dubai who actively invited challenge.

In meetings, disagreement was not just permitted, it was expected. Ideas were tested, stretched and sometimes dismantled altogether.

I regularly left those conversations with my head spinning: pages of notes, questions to explore, research to read and assumptions to reconsider.

What mattered was not that my ideas, or anyone else’s, were always accepted - many were not - but that they were taken seriously. Challenge was framed as a professional contribution, not criticism.

Crucially, there was no sense of punishment for thinking differently. You could question decisions, suggest alternatives and push boundaries, knowing it would not be held against you later.

That freedom created intellectual energy. It also created accountability: if you were going to challenge, you needed to think carefully, articulate clearly and follow through. It also created some of the most impactful and successful initiatives within the school.

Looking back, this was psychological safety in action. Not comfort, not agreement - but trust and the confidence to think out loud in a demanding professional space.

Psychological safety did not make the work easier; it made it better.

The confidence to think out loud

Sadly, not all leaders experience this kind of challenge as positive. For less secure leaders, professional questioning can feel destabilising.

Challenge is seen as resistance. Alternative viewpoints as disloyalty. Intellectual disagreement as a personal attack.

This is made even worse if schools try to “talk the talk” on psychological safety - perhaps through staff briefings or one-off professional development sessions - while failing to actually cultivate this as a culture.

Staff see through this hypocrisy quickly in the micro-interactions of school life: the line manager who quietly shuts concerns down; corridor conversations that are never followed up; consequences that seem to follow on from asking awkward questions.

Over time, these small moments accumulate, shaping whether people feel confident to think aloud or choose to stay silent.

In these contexts, the rhetoric of safety can deepen cynicism more than if psychological safety were never mentioned.

Leading psychological safety requires courage

There is no doubt that for school leaders, fostering true psychological safety is demanding work.

It requires consistency, humility and the willingness to be challenged. It also requires resisting the temptation to use the language of wellbeing as a shield against scrutiny. Hardest, perhaps, is admitting to not knowing everything or sometimes being wrong.

But staff do not need leaders to be perfect; they need them to be fair and coherent.

This is done best through small, everyday habits: listening without rehearsing a response, asking genuine questions rather than rhetorical ones and being explicit when challenge is welcome, especially when it is uncomfortable.

It involves following up on concerns raised privately, not just those voiced publicly, and being consistent in how disagreement is handled, regardless of who raises it.

Above all, it requires leaders to separate challenge from threat, and curiosity from defiance. Ultimately, psychological safety is revealed not in what leaders say, but in what happens when someone speaks up.

If schools want cultures where staff thrive, learn and stay, leaders must move beyond slogans and commit to true psychological safety.

Christopher Hoare is head of upper school at Colegio Peruano Británico in Peru

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