KEY WORDS: psychological climate, criteria to define positive school climate, primary school management principles, current school tendencies.
ABSTRACT: The paper raises a number of important and critical questions of the modern school education – how to develop and define a positive psychological and educational climate, what are its main criteria, and what type of management  should be used.

More and more often we hear about the cases of adults’ aggressive behavior towards children and children towards one another. Though it is self-evident that the comfortable psychological climate of the educational institution is always one of the critical factors to achieve success in instruction and education, as well as the proper level of relationships.

Below we enumerate a number of criteria which, in our understanding, could characterize a positive psychological climate in any educational institution:

• Positive emotional relationships
• A high level of school community coherence
• A feeling of pride because of the work in this particular school with this particular fellow colleagues
• A high level of satisfaction with one’s own work results
• An overall high level of satisfaction at school
• Relationships among teachers and students overgrow the school building and happen in their leisure time as well
• Meaningful school traditions
• If conflicts happen, they are insignificant and do not last for a long time
• If somebody criticizes somebody, the critique is positive, friendly, and is not accepted as a threat
• There is no confrontation between the administration and the teachers
•  The administration and teachers are united in their understanding and readiness to fulfill their mission and goals
• The teachers respect their school administrators
• School dominant attitude could be defined as mutual understanding and mutual respect
• Everybody’s achievements are registered and stimulated in good time
• There is mutual respect at school
• Teachers do their social work with pleasure
• The basic dominating principle in the relationships among teachers is tolerance
• A low level of sick leaves on behalf of both – teachers and students
• A well-shaped and mutually prepared concept and program of school development and teachers’ readiness to work in accordance with this program
• The administration is able to create situations of multiple choices which provide success for every school member
• Instruction and extracurricular activities are full of positive emotions
• Meaningful life values are positive and stable
• Teachers are coming to work full of positive emotions, they are also happy to leave school in the evening or for vacations. They are no less happy coming back, and they miss their school, their colleagues, students, and their interesting, difficult and noble work.
• Any evaluation of their work by the administration does not cause horror and fear in teachers
• Mutual support, mentorship, collaboration in different projects, including preparations for new classes is widely used
• School administration is focused on creating a strong ‘culture of health’ inside the building, and uses a number of different techniques including psychological support, reduction of workloads and stresses.

Criteria of the positive educational climate

• Creation of different conditions which could stimulate teachers’ professional development and interest towards their professional self-education
• Creation of all necessary conditions and support for any variants of teachers’ creativity
• Support of innovations at school
• Constant need on the part of the teachers to do research and to stimulate research impulses among students
• Challenging creative activities of teachers and students
• Successful work of teachers’ organizations and the school community
• Support of students’ initiatives and self-management
• Evaluation of teachers’ and students’ activities is protective, supportive and friendly
• In the process of evaluation the school success and activities, the level of the overall reflective culture remains high and well-developed
• School instruction and education management is based on the analysis of the problems of one’s own educational establishment
• Teachers’ workload does not exceed 20 hours of active teaching per week
• Teachers are quite creative and put out a number of their own initiatives as well as they eagerly participate in numerous school activities
• School meetings are usually attractive for everybody, developing and not irritating in nature
• Teachers are interested in reading books in their subject- and related fields as well as in the field of education and psychology
• Teachers are constantly and eagerly discussing their professional problems
• The school could boast a very good level of exchanging experience and innovations
• School library is well equipped to provide teachers with support at professional and methodical levels
• Whenever there is a problem teachers could always expect professional help from their administration and fellow teachers
• Teachers take an active role in every administrative decision and at every stage of school management
• There is a serious desire on the part of the teachers to participate and be successful in different professional contests.

Primary management principles: sharing responsibilities, the administration’s unity, challenging the initiative and creativity on the part of the teachers

The main resource of the school activity could be formulated as follows, it is leadership (management) as a coordinated and balanced system that allows studying the subject, formulating realistic goals and tasks, and fulfilling a number of different organizational and planned activities to achieve those goals.

Within these boundaries it is very important to realize the principles of sharing responsibilities, administration’s unity, challenging the initiative and creativity on the part of the teachers.

Currently we are witnessing a tendency to go away from the old administrative style and to use instead a managerial type of leading schools when a school principal becomes more of an educational manager. As a result, many schools start using research-proved modern management standards and norms, which presuppose a project-resource approach to the daily functioning and development of an educational establishment. The latter means to keep a close eye on monitoring success and problems, on resources and the analysis of the current situation; it also demands defining goals and tasks, developing programs and strategic plans, organizational activities, and all sorts of legal, cadre, research and information resources and arrangements.

Such a managerial approach means using different interests, possibilities, and forces that are interested in the school development. Though if we are talking about an invariant type of education, then there is no need to democratize school management or to make any changes there. A new approach is prompted by an increase in the number of “education consumers’ and ‘customers’ and together with them a switch to a multi-channel way of financing education.

But if to consider growing education funds only kind of payment for the fear or just a way for the society and parents to leave the work of education and teaching totally with the school, and to keep schools as the only institutions responsible for the results of students’ education, then we won’t be able to achieve any stable and positive results. The reason for this is simple – you cannot buy with money genuine traditions of culture and spiritual work, and you cannot create school uniqueness in this way; let us all remember that schools could achieve any positive humanistic goals only working in cooperation and harmony with the society and never regardless of it.

This is why we believe that institutions of the so-called supplementary education (personally, the author would prefer the term the system of social education) – parents, different local and governmental organizations, business community, institutions of science, culture and sports play a vital role in children’s and young adults’ social education.