Philip Riley, author of the annual Principals Health and Wellbeing report, colloquially known as the Riley report, is in Tasmania for three days meeting with principals and union members.

Mr Riley said he hadn't been in Tasmania for work for a couple of years, but he hadn't seen a marked improvement in conditions from the last time he was here.

"Principals are under an enormous amount of stress," he said. The state government earlier this year released the Principals Health and Wellbeing strategy, which complements the child and student strategy, released last year, was "a good first step" but Mr Riley said he hoped to see more detail soon.

He said the wellbeing strategy was still "vague" and he wasn't sure what the government and the Education Department would implement to ensure principals got the support they needed.

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While the issues plaguing Tasmanian principals correlate with their mainland counterparts, Mr Riley said he hoped with the release of the strategy that action would be taken sooner rather than later.

"A reasonable amount of that stress is due to department procedures and protocol," he said.

Documenting and measuring success took away a lot of time in paperwork and other administrative tasks, things that should be done by someone else, according to Mr Riley.

"Imagine, you've got the person who is the highest paid position, doing administrative tasks," he said.

Those tasks take up a lot of time and take principals away from their core duties of teaching and caring for students and teachers.

The Principals Health and Wellbeing report is released each year in February, with data collected from July.

This year's report found principals in Tasmania were more likely than any state to experience bullying, and it was most likely to be perpetrated by school parents.

In 2011, bullying against principals in Tasmania was at 40 per cent but that has jumped to 46 per cent in 2018, which is the highest figure in the country. Parents perpetrated the bullying against principals in 21 per cent of the cases in 2018, higher than students, colleagues and managers.

The principals' health and wellbeing strategy will implement a psychologist and two "wellbeing leaders" into state schools to help support senior staff during critical incidents, such as the prevalence of violence. The staff allocation is part of a number of measures the department is putting in place.

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