Teachers with their unique key position in school, their everyday influence on school climate, and their professional responsibility to establish a positive and healthy school climate, possess crucial information for facilitating and sustaining a positive school climate. Previous research commonly describes the multidimensional features acting as precondition for the school climate in four domains: academic climate, community, safety, and institutional environment. Each domain contributes individually but also jointly to the school climate and how it is collectively experienced both from inside and outside the school. While teachers have a significant impact on the school climate, less is known about teachers’ perspectives on these matters. To better understand teachers’ everyday efforts in influencing the school climate, the aim of this study was to explore and analyse a) teachers’ perspectives on factors influencing the school climate and b) the teachers’ apprehension of their possibility to influence these factors 

Bronfenbrenner’s social-ecological theory was adopted as a theoretical framework in the present study. Data were collected by means of 14 semi-structured focus groups interviews with 73 teachers from two compulsory schools in southeast Sweden. The analysis was guided by a constructivist grounded theory approach. 

The results reveal that teachers experienced the school climate as both positively and negatively influenced by several internal and external factors perceived as either influenceable or uninfluenceable. According to how teachers reasoned, four types of factors affected the quality of the school climate and their everyday efforts in facilitating and sustaining a positive school climate: Social processes and values in school (i.e. influenceable internal factors), school premises and support structures (i.e. uninfluenceable internal factors impossible to influence), external relations (i.e. influenceable external factors) and external means of control (i.e. uninfluenceable external factors). The conclusion is that the teachers’ talked about school climate as a multidimensional and malleable phenomenon, emanated by a complex interplay across multiple agents and contexts both within and outside the school aligning with all domains and features acting as precondition for the school climate. 

 The findings are relevant to Nordic educational research and suggest that teachers try to accommodate desired school climate and work with the conditions that exist in a constructive way. Further, the findings shed light on a contemporary societal discussion about what characterises the responsibility of the school. Notwithstanding, highlighted in this study, there are factors outside the school influencing the school climate that are beyond the influence of the school and its teachers.