“I have always been uncomfortable with the idea of marketing a workplace culture that employees themselves would not recognise. For us, the priority has been to build the culture first and talk about it second.”
Erin Caceda · Principal, Allegra School Coffs Harbour
School size
Micro, under 30 employees, in Coffs Harbour on the NSW mid north coast
Segment
Education and training. An independent secondary school teaching Years 9 and 10 to young people whose schooling has been interrupted or has not worked elsewhere
Recognition
Great Place To Work® Certified™ 2026, and ranked first in the Micro category of the Best Workplaces™ in Australia 2026 List, on its first survey
Women at Allegra scored it 98%. Men scored it 98%. Staff in their first two years, 98%. Staff of six to ten years, 98%. Full-time employees, 97%. Part-time, 99%. Employees outside management, 98%.
That flatness is what Principal Erin Caceda names as the school’s proudest result. The headline was strong too. In its first year of measurement, 100% of employees said Allegra is a great place to work, against 60% at a typical Australian company, and the school ranked first in the Micro category of the Best Workplaces in Australia 2026 List.
Allegra is an independent school in Coffs Harbour with fewer than 30 staff, teaching Years 9 and 10 to young people for whom mainstream schooling has not worked.
“We work with young people who often have complex needs and require highly skilled, consistent and emotionally available adults around them. We cannot provide the quality of education and support our students deserve if the people providing it are exhausted or overwhelmed.”
Erin Caceda · Principal, Allegra School Coffs Harbour
#1
Best Workplaces in Australia 2026
Allegra ranked first in the Micro category
Ahead of every other listed organisation with 10 to 29 employees, in the school’s first year of measurement.
-
100%
Say Allegra is a great place to work
Measured against 60% at a typical Australian company, on the school’s first survey.
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98%
The figure almost every group landed on
Women, men, each tenure band and staff outside management all averaged the same across every survey statement.
The Challenge: Nine Years of Getting Better
The catalyst was not a crisis, a resignation or a competitor. It was fatigue. Allegra had spent nine years building, refining and consolidating its model, always asking how to do things better.
“Even positive change can create change fatigue. I became increasingly conscious that, while we were always focused on the next improvement or the next challenge, we also needed to stop and recognise what we had already built together.”
So Certification was asked to do two jobs. One was diagnostic, an independent read on the culture rather than the executive team’s belief about it. The other was a reason to stop and mark what nine years had built.
What the school could already see, and what it could not
Allegra tracked retention and attrition and took part in sector surveys including the ISNSW Perspectives Survey. The limitation was the lens. Every measure came back through an education frame: teaching practice, school effectiveness, student outcomes.
“Retention data was useful, but it could only tell us that people were staying. It could not necessarily tell us why they were staying or how they genuinely felt about the school as a workplace.”
What was missing was a measure aimed only at culture. Erin wanted to separate the question “Are we an effective school?” from the question “Is this genuinely a great place for our people to work?” The Trust Index™ Survey answered the second one.
The Surprise: One Uncomfortable Number
The overall result came back higher than Erin had expected. Impartiality did not. It scored lower than she wanted, and that gap is what the executive team took away to work on.
“In a small team it can be easy for responsibility to naturally gravitate towards the person who puts their hand up first, has particular expertise, or is known to get something done well,” she says. “While that can make an organisation responsive and efficient, it can also unintentionally create perceptions of inequity or lead to an over-reliance on particular people.”
In a team of under 30, the person who is good at something keeps being handed it, which reads as trust from one seat and as a closed door from another. The question it raised was whether delegations and opportunities were being distributed as deliberately as they could be.
A second result asked whether staff felt they had the information and training they needed. “In education, there can sometimes be an assumption that because someone is a qualified and experienced educator, they automatically have all the preparation they need,” Erin says. A teaching degree qualifies someone to teach. It does not brief them on how a specialist school runs, and until recently that knowledge was undocumented.
The Response: Structures First
Allegra’s first move was inward. The executive team read several of the improvement areas as problems of leadership clarity and distribution of responsibility, which made the fix theirs before anyone else’s.
“Our first response was to look inward rather than immediately asking staff to change anything. Before asking staff for further input, we needed to make sure our own structures were clear.”
The sequence is worth stealing: clarify leadership, then clarify systems, then make room for staff voice inside them. Executive position descriptions were rewritten and delegations clarified. Quick-reference guides and Standard Operating Procedures followed, because much of how the school worked existed only in the heads of the people who had been there longest.
“They worked because experienced people knew how things were done, but that also meant some important organisational knowledge lived in people rather than in systems. The survey helped us recognise that this was not sustainable.”
Operating policies are now circulated for comment before they are finalised. Not every staff member wants to read every policy. What matters is that the opportunity exists rather than the finished decision arriving on the desk.
What Allegra Protects
The GLOW Grant
Each year Allegra funds one significant professional learning experience and deliberately fills the group across roles, so an executive leader, a teacher, a Learning Support Officer and an administrative employee might travel together. Past projects have taken staff to Cambodia to look at NGOs and different models of collaboration, and on a flight over Antarctica to build cross-curricular material. Tasmania is next. Staff design the experience themselves rather than attending a course tied to a job description.
“It reinforces the message that we are prepared to invest in our employees as people and professionals, not simply in the tasks they perform for us.”
Time the school protects
The school day is built so staff have protected time after students leave to plan, collaborate and finish their work. Erin describes the problem it fixes as endemic in schools: collaboration valued in theory with no space allocated to it, which makes it something people end up doing in their own time. At a small specialist school a single student often needs a coordinated response from teachers, learning support, wellbeing staff and leadership.
Once a week the office and shared workspaces also go quiet and the phones go off. Unless something is urgent, the “while I’ve got you” request waits.
“A two-minute question may only take two minutes for the person asking it, but it can completely break the concentration of the person answering it.”
Wellbeing that gets spent
Every employee has a $300 annual wellbeing benefit, reimbursed against anything supporting their physical or personal wellbeing. Staff have claimed running shoes, gym memberships and fitness equipment. A Winter Wellness program runs each year and changes with staff interest. In 2026 it was an eight-week yoga block, one hour a week at 7:00am before school. An external Employee Assistance Program sits behind all of it.
“Wellbeing cannot rely solely on referring somebody to a service once they are already overwhelmed. We want to continually ask: what can we change about the workplace itself to make it more sustainable?”
Leaders on the relief roster
Allegra’s senior leaders are on the casual relief roster. When a staff member is away and internal coverage is needed, an executive leader may take the class or pick up the operational job for the day. Around it sits a daily rhythm: barista-made coffee every morning with the senior team out having it alongside everyone else, and scheduled roving duties that keep executives in classrooms rather than behind a door.
“It means leaders aren’t making decisions about workload, systems or student needs from a distance. It also sends an important message to staff: there is no work in the school that is considered ‘beneath’ leadership.”
Leadership below the executive team
Staff are supported into targeted development programs including StepLabs, and teachers are backed through pathways such as Highly Accomplished Teacher accreditation. Development covers leadership conversations, feedback and handling difficult conversations. Middle leaders take part in planning, policy development and problem-solving rather than receiving decisions made above them.
“We want leadership to be something people practise, not simply a title they are given.”
Underneath sits Allegra Dynamic, the framework Erin is proudest of, which gives every staff member regular reflective supervision and extends the same principle to students through partnerships with organisations including OzHarvest, TAFE and Bell Shakespeare. The survey also flagged succession planning as the next job, framed as building leadership capacity rather than naming replacements.
“When staff feel supported to grow, they create opportunities for students to thrive, and our students, in turn, make a positive contribution to their community.”
The Results: The Same Answer From Every Group
Safety at work, fair treatment regardless of race or sexual orientation, and pride in the workplace all came back with unanimous agreement. The number Erin returns to is the one underneath. Employees outside management averaged 98% across every survey statement, which rules out a strong overall score being carried by the leadership team. For a school of fewer than 30 people doing very different jobs on very different arrangements, that flatness is harder to produce than the headline.
“We do not want a workplace where the experience is exceptional for one particular group while another group experiences the organisation differently. Our goal has always been to create a culture that people experience consistently, regardless of who they are, how long they have worked with us, or how they work.”
Erin Caceda · Principal, Allegra School Coffs Harbour
What the ranking changed
Until this year Allegra had no real employer-brand strategy, and that was on purpose. Its reputation spread through former staff, other educators and the Coffs Harbour community, and candidates arrive already repeating what they have heard about the culture. What the school lacked was proof that did not come from its own mouth.
“Being named Australia’s #1 Best Workplace in our category has also made us recognise that we have probably been too quiet about what we have built.”
The Certification is now moving into email signatures, recruitment advertising, the website and physical signage at the school. The principle stays the same. The external story has to reflect the internal reality rather than stand in for it.
What Changed
The first year of Trust Index work, in specifics
- Every executive leadership position description reviewed and revised, with delegations and collaborative authority documented
- Standard Operating Procedures introduced, so organisational knowledge sits in systems rather than in individuals
- Operating policies and significant procedures circulated to all staff for comment before they are finalised
- Quick-reference guides built for common processes, so new staff are not reliant on knowing who to ask
- Succession planning reframed as building leadership capacity across the school rather than naming replacements
- Trust Index results adopted as the baseline to track alongside retention, absenteeism, recruitment and internal promotion
What Comes Next: Growing Without Diluting
Allegra is heading towards expansion, and Erin names the risk without softening it.
“Much of Allegra’s culture has developed organically over time. As we grow, we cannot assume that culture will simply replicate itself. We need to become much more deliberate about defining what is essential, what needs to be protected, and how we embed those expectations into our systems, leadership, induction and everyday practice.”
She sets that against a sector under strain, where teachers and education staff report rising workload, compliance burden and burnout. Erin declines the comfortable move of assuming a strong culture makes a school immune. Her job, as she frames it, is to keep asking what sits within the school’s control: reducing administrative and cognitive load, designing clearer systems, protecting time, and making sure growth does not just mean asking good people to carry more.
“I’ve learned that people don’t resist change. They resist feeling left behind. When people feel trusted, supported and connected to a shared purpose, they don’t just adapt to change. They become the people who drive it.”
Erin Caceda · Principal, Allegra School Coffs Harbour
Where Culture Work Starts
Allegra set out to measure its culture separately from its effectiveness as a school. The 100% confirmed that nine years of work had built something real. The impartiality result told the school where to look next, which is the part a headline number can never do on its own. If your read on your own culture comes from measures designed to assess something else, you are inferring rather than knowing. A school with a perfect score still found a gap worth closing. The question is whether you would be able to find yours.
