Peer-reviewed article

School Climate over Teacher Traits: A Multilevel Analysis of Teacher Well-Being in Refugee and Host-Community Schools in Kenya

Abdimalik Ibrahim Farah, Endale Kebede, Francis Kiroro, Patricia Kitsao-Wekulo, Erick Makhapila et al. · 2 Oct 2026

Abstract

Teacher well-being is increasingly recognised as central to education quality in crisis-affected settings, yet most evidence treats it as an individual attribute rather than a property of the schools in which teachers work. This study asks how much of the variation in teacher well-being lies between schools versus within them, and which factors predict it, in Kenya’s refugee and host-community schools. Drawing on the TeachWell Teacher Well-Being Study, survey data from 884 teachers nested within 58 schools in Garissa and Turkana Counties were analysed. A composite Teacher Well-Being Index (0–100) was constructed from five validated domains, and a four-block hierarchical linear model was fitted, decomposing variance and estimating fixed effects by restricted maximum likelihood. In the unconditional model, 11.3% of the variation in well-being lay between schools; adding school structural and climate variables reduced the share of variance lying between schools by approximately half. After adjustment, individual demographic characteristics were non-significant, and higher educational attainment was associated with lower well-being (β = −2.29, p = .033). Teacher-reported school-climate conditions dominated: adequate lesson preparation (β = 10.51), teacher recognition (β = 8.16) and teacher–pupil relationships (β = 6.57) were the strongest predictors, each far exceeding any individual trait. The study contributes one of the few multilevel tests, in a refugee-hosting setting, of whether teacher well-being is better explained by who teachers are or by the schools in which they work. Because the data are cross-sectional and climate was reported by the same teachers, the associations are not causal and may be inflated by shared method variance. Within these limits, the findings position teacher well-being as substantially shaped by school organisation rather than fixed by teacher characteristics, and identify preparation, recognition and relational support as promising, comparatively low-cost targets for humanitarian education systems.