Rethinking the contribution of school infrastructure to educational outcomes through the lens of complexity
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2025
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This thesis examines how students’ experiences of school infrastructure, conceptualised as the Institutional Environment within the School Climate framework, predict educational outcomes in secondary schools when these schools are viewed as complex, dynamic systems.
The motivation for this research stems from a fundamental tension in educational policy and research. While school infrastructure requires significant capital and operational investment, traditional Evidence-Based Policymaking typically deems it to have minimal direct impact on educational outcomes. In contrast, emerging studies suggest that infrastructure may exert important indirect influences, such as through teacher satisfaction or student attendance, prompting some researchers to reassess its role. Simultaneously, School Climate research increasingly recognises infrastructure as an integral element of the broader system shaping school experience and outcomes. This study responds to these developments by re-examining infrastructure not as a peripheral backdrop but as a potentially active driver of educational outcomes.
Grounded in pragmatism and informed by complexity theory, the research investigates context-specific, non-linear relationships between the students’ experiences of infrastructure and student outcomes. Using an adapted School Climate survey in ten government-funded secondary schools in New South Wales, the study analyses student experience and student-reported wellbeing and behaviour data. X-means clustering identifies outcome groups, and gradient boosted trees (GBTs) predict cluster membership from 73 School Climate attributes, including 23 infrastructure-specific measures.
Four key findings emerge. First, student outcomes can be clustered meaningfully across all schools, preserving their multidimensional nature and reflecting complex configurations of wellbeing and behaviour rather than reducing multi-faceted outcome constructs to isolated metrics. Second, the predictive relationships between School Climate attributes and outcomes are found to be context-dependent and non-linear, highlighting the limits of generalisable, predominantly linear, models describing statistical relationships between educational outcomes and the factors believed to influence them. Third, students’ perceptions of infrastructure—specifically lighting, cleanliness, spatial adequacy, and ambient comfort—consistently emerge as strong predictors of wellbeing and behaviour, positioning infrastructure as a central rather than peripheral factor in shaping student experience. Finally, the findings demonstrate that GBTs can effectively model the complexity of educational systems and potentially offer predictive insights without oversimplifying student experience.
Theoretically, this research further embeds complexity into educational discourse and validates infrastructure as a core element of School Climate. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of clustering and GBTs in modelling system interdependencies while maintaining fidelity of student voice. This research supports the inclusion of student-reported infrastructure experiences when considering school improvement strategies and policy. The findings highlight the potential for context-sensitive, evidence-informed, and complexity-aware approaches, recognising infrastructure as an active, but typically overlooked, driver of student wellbeing and behaviour, particularly in disadvantaged contexts.
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