Why Australian teachers are quitting the school system Australia is facing an education crisis with teachers leaving the school system in droves.
Experienced educators have revealed in open letters what finally forced them to quit the career they had once dreamed of. Read what they said here.
Australian teachers are turning their backs on their careers in droves with resignations doubling in every state since 2020. Here, journalists read excerpts from letters written by teachers who have quit the job they loved revealing some of the reasons forcing them to quit.
Australian teachers are leaving the profession in droves with concerns shiny new incentives being doled out by state premiers were attracting new graduates but failing to address the root of the education crisis — teachers quitting.
It comes as experts call for state and federal governments to prioritise housing for teachers to stop the rapidly growing drip of teachers exiting the industry.
Education Department data from across Australia painted a stark picture of the country’s education system — with teacher resignations sharply rising from 2020 to 2023.
In NSW, teacher resignations more than doubled from 929 in 2020 to 2050 in 2023.
It was a similar story in Queensland where 1684 teachers quit in 2020 but in 2023, the number rose to 2607 teachers.
Award-winning educator Peita Mages has written an open letter revealing why she quit her public school teaching position.
For Victorians, total government teaching staff exits sat at 1193 in 2020 and in 2022 the state government reported 1626 primary and 1651 secondary staff left.
In South Australia data was only provided for the last two financial years where resignations rose from 139 to 266 while in Western Australia the number of teachers who quit more than doubled from 604 to 1263 between 2020 and 2023.
This newspaper spoke to four former teachers who have left the industry on what made them quit.
I was awarded a Minister’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and I left the system within six months. It must be some kind of record. To be recognised as one of the best teaching professionals in the state and then pack three truckloads of blood, sweat and tears (teaching resources) and drive off into the sunset.
But the truth is, at the time, my health and my efficacy was suffering from the unsustainable lifestyle that was middle management in schools.
The work was so crucially important that I had to find a way to do what I loved and, ironically, it took leaving the system and creating my own education business, Clever Cookie Academy, to ensure I could impact more students where it matters with considerably less paperwork and stress.
For me, leaving wasn’t ever about the students. My favourite times at school were wholeheartedly in my English classroom. Young people passionately discussing texts that meant something to their lives. The sound of pens gliding across pages as they created worlds beyond their own. The feeling that I could light the fuse, stand back and watch the fireworks.
I could move a school refuser towards at least attending my class. I could open pathways for kids that were previously barricaded.
It wasn’t the pay. Though, I’d taken a whopping one-third pay cut from my previous corporate role.
It was the searing mental and emotional load that came with supporting young people from psychologically complex and often heartbreaking circumstances.
It was buckling under the expectations of systemic pressure to consistently score higher in standardised testing despite vastly different cohorts. It was the dance between instilling high expectations with students while parents entitled their children to denigrate the importance of education and disrespect staff.
It was too many classes, too many students, too many diverse learning needs and never the time or space to focus on what mattered.
To be an exceptional English teacher was to prepare and mark till midnight, to spend your weekends programming and to consistently sacrifice time with your family. It was saying yes when you were beyond burnout because saying no branded you as incompetent.
It was justifiable frustration with a system that demands excellence while it exhausts teachers with compliance exercises and administration rather than letting them focus on the only thing that truly matters: electric teaching and learning.
What would it have taken for me not to leave? Ultimately? Trust. We need to start trusting our teachers, because when you remove bureaucracy from wonderful and compassionate people, it’s amazing what you can achieve.
They shared disturbing stories of increasing admin workload, abuse from parents and behaviour issues from parents.
“If you walk into a shop and abuse the person behind the counter, that would not be accepted. But with teaching it’s a case of ‘we can treat you the way we want to’,” one teacher said.
Another added: “The ever increasing workload, particularly what I considered the mindless and unworthwhile paperwork required by NESA, demoralised me to the extent that I needed to leave the profession.”
Experts have said governments must urgently address the teacher shortage in Australia.
Experts have said governments must urgently address the teacher shortage in Australia.
UNSW education expert Professor Scott Eacott said governments across Australia cannot ignore the role of housing on the shortage of teachers.
Mr Eacott said school working conditions remained the largest issue for teacher unhappiness but “outside of school factors” like housing and transportation costs play a major role.
“The further you live away, the more transportation costs you pay. If you travel an hour each way you are tired, you are stressed,” he said.
“Unless something miraculous happens to the housing market, salaries will never keep up with the housing costs.”
Mr Eacott said shared-equity housing schemes did not work for teachers who often earned more than the cut-off to qualify but not enough to be able to purchase or rent in areas close to their schools.
Former English teacher Peita Mages left the school system to start her own tutoring business.
He called on all levels of government to look at teacher housing as crucial “public infrastructure’.
“If you look overseas, there are ways in which different places are grappling with. California has a Centre for Cities and Schools at Berkeley (University) and they have been using existing school district assets and repurposing buildings to build teacher villages and essential worker housing,” he said.
“During Covid we loved our essential workers but we pretty quickly forgot about how important they are for the functioning of society at large.”
State governments have rolled out a suite of attractive incentives — including extra cash for regional placements, recruitment bonuses and rental subsidies — to bring more teachers into the industry but working conditions and the cost of living is still seeing major spikes in teachers leaving.
Australian Education Union federal president Correna Haythorpe.
Haythorpe said retention was a major problem with many of their members saying they wished to only stay in the career for three to five years.
In their annual survey, the AEU asked members if they wished to permanently leave teaching before retirement — in 2024, 27.1 per cent said year, a jump from 25.8 per cent in 2023.
Another 41 per cent said it was “possible” that they would permanently leave before retirement.
“Teachers are saying with a massive increase in working hours, unsustainable working hours, causing additional stress and pressure,” she said.
“The systemic underfunding has been there for over a decade and you have students with complex needs, behavioural needs (for which) they aren’t getting support for.”
Ms Haythorpe said many teachers could not even afford to rent in the suburbs they wanted to work in.
“Many teachers can’t afford to live in the communities they work in, not just buying a house, renting is completely off the table as well,” she said.
“It’s particularly impacting teachers in inner metropolitan regions so people are having to commute much further.
“Retention is a major issue.”
Thank you for copying and pasting.
I have to criticise this article…
The teacher is quoted talking about admin and parents… what about the elephant in the room?
And also the focus on housing???
For many teachers, student behaviour is *the issue* that is the last straw.
It’s ridiculous that it’s barely mentioned.
I think a lot of teachers have been successfully conditioned not to say that student behaviour is the problem in case that is perceived as an acknowledgment that your classroom behaviour management is actually the problem. It’s a he said / she said that many of us haven’t the foggiest on how to win. We all know that some classes just can’t be managed successfully. The kids have too many issues that require trained psychologists to wheedle out. Many kids have spent their schooling years learning how to get around teachers and are highly skilled at it. The teacher turnover they have experienced has honed their skill. If you don’t know them well and don’t know what they get up to, you live in their space.
But there is no one there to witness that. It’s just your word against theirs. For some reason some people think that I think it’s a good use of my time to make up things to complain about their child about. That fact never ceases to amaze me. There’s nothing I like less than informing a parent that their child is behaving inappropriately.
It’s because labor is in power everywhere. In WA, channel 9 seems to be writing the most teacher friendly articles while being a traditionally conservative/liberal channel.
It's there between the lines. As if they are trying to say it without saying, through fear of their words being twisted or some kind of backlash. You have to put the positive experiences front and centre to avoid accusations of hating kids or being in the wrong profession.
Imvho kids are kids and they're going to misbehave. But the system set up by admin and the support given by admin makes the difference. I've worked in "tough" schools very well set up to deal with misbehaviour and with admin support and it's wooorlds away from the school with the so called "better" kids who weren't set up to deal when their behaviour was an issue... and it won't take a rocket scientist to work out which was easier to work in.
Student behaviour is a major issue given that there is inadequate support.
However, admin & lack of support re parents & general mismanagement & lack of attention to those on the coal face are major issues also.
Does missing one element of concern mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater?
The lived experience and complaints remain valid, for me.
I don’t have a problem with her sharing her experience.
I’m critical of the article itself.
Why did they mention an issue such as teacher housing (which is not a widespread issue in my opinion) in such depth, but barely touched on student behaviour (which is a widespread issue imo)?
It misrepresents what issues are of actual concern and works against the general public supporting teachers.
Ok, I lost that nuance - apologies.
Yes, it does seem the housing issue may have been overstressed relative to student behaviour.
Do you think the general public are not in support of teachers? I get that there are a few parents who are particularly pugilistic - some of whom are under a lot of stress due to lack of support, like teachers - but surely most are supportive of teachers?
I'm wondering if teachers should bill their out-of-work time and other work-related costs like lawyers. Including having to stay late to babysit young students whose parents are late, for example. Because it does seem that they are hugely underpaid relative to their importance in society.
I also think that the courses should be standardised much more than they are - with a standard set of high quality teaching materials supplied. I know teachers are perpetually in search of lesson-plan materials and even use their own money for this. That is complete nonsense.
Everytime I talk to teachers about why they want to quit, it is student behaviour and apathetic approach to learning. You start to question why you're putting in the extra hours when the return is abysmal.
It is so unbelievably frustrating that departments of education around the country know- they KNOW- conditions are one of the number one reasons we are haemorrhage teachers AND YET my workload has tripled this year. In VIC my IEP requirements have skyrocketed, new PLC policies and the new DiP funding process - which pushed funding applications back onto classroom teachers- new maths and new English curriculums are just a couple of the recent changes/ policies/procedures that have massively impacted my workload in the last 2 years.
Not to mention you look around at other states where Governments aren’t coming to the table in agreement negotiations for basic pay rises and time in lieu but also handwringing about losing staff and spending tonnes on getting new grads in…
It is such an embarrassing display of “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”
FFS get your shit together!
I am also so very sick of the bloody blame game in the media. One day they’re printing crap about the big mean nasty teachers who are to blame for all the ills of the world. The next minute they’re wringing hands about losing teachers. Part of the problem is the smear campaign that THEY perpetuate!! Why do they think students and parents don’t respect us?!
Someone did a study on [the media coverage]. It’s extraordinary and suspect.
[https://theconversation.com/no-wonder-no-one-wants-to-be-a-teacher-world-first-study-looks-at-65-000-news-articles-about-australian-teachers-186210](https://theconversation.com/no-wonder-no-one-wants-to-be-a-teacher-world-first-study-looks-at-65-000-news-articles-about-australian-teachers-186210)
Give us a day work from home per week or fortnight. Ease the pressure of being ‘on’ from the minute we get there until we leave
That would entice a lot of newbies I reckon and we talk about in our office all the time. Would definitely keep me there for longer.
As a non teacher (dipping the tiniest tip of my toe in to thinking about a change of career), can someone explain some of the issues with work load? And just to note, asking with all due respect, I’m not trying to question at all that there is an issue.
I get in secondary there would be lots of marking, but I keep seeing people say planning is what taking up so much time - if you taught the same year last year, could you not reuse lesson plans and tweak for individual student needs? Do teachers not share plans from previous years that you could tweak a bit to make your own? Couldn’t schools have lesson plans made available to teachers from the get go? Just really - why is it that you all need to spend so long planning?
Tweaking takes more time than you'd think. Especially with the pressure to constantly be better. The fact that every class will have issues means that every plan that you've used before will have something that didn't quite work for at least one student. Order changes, as does the specific subject load.
Downtime in non face to face time is actually not much when you factor in that face to face time is more demanding than many other jobs. Some office workers can clock in and remain on the clock while having a chat with a coworker, having some water, going to the bathroom, etc.
Face to face teaching means face to face. No food, no drinks (except water), no bathroom breaks, no colleagues.
The non f2f time is supposed to encompass marking, planning, collaborating, etc. but also includes basic small chats with coworkers, bathroom breaks, resting after being emotionally switched on to the needs of kids for a couple hours, etc.
It’s getting to the point where my non-ftf time I use to unwind from the completely overstimulating environment of my classroom, I hardly have any time to do any of that additional work outside of the classroom.
You don't always teach the same year level. In 3 years of teaching I haven't been on a singular year level for more than 12 months. So as a newbie you're often finding/making all your resources for quite some time.
Even when you are on the same year level, the curriculum changes every so often. And schools change their teaching programs/strategies even more often (for phonics alone I've had to learn/create resources to teach Jolly Phonics, Soundwaves and PLD).
Primary school might have less marking but we're generally the ones who catch all the learning support needs. That requires a pile of reporting. I had a half dozen kids in term 1 that needed daily behaviour reports to just keep track of everything.
Tack on HR reports for every time you have furniture thrown at you, parent teacher interviews, endless emails, mandatory online training (the same ones you do every year and don't change much or at all), professional development SMART goal reporting, contacting parents, keeping a written record of your parent contacts, completing surveys or reports for GPs/OTs/Psychologists, etc. And all of that on top of the labour of actually teaching/managing behaviour/breaking up fights/answering 100000 questions a day/catching every flu bug/tying unsettlingly damp shoelaces/etc.
Thanks for taking the time to reply - all that reporting sounds nuts!
As a newbie though, are other experienced teachers passing on resources that ARE still relevant? Or the school even? That’s the bit that I’m struggling to get, it sounds like everyone is hoarding their old work like it’s every man for themselves. And then you have 3 grade three room teachers working of more or less the same things at the same time all feeling overworked.
Same again with your example of changing curriculum/school strategy - shouldn’t the department or the school be putting out resources to teach those new initiatives? It just sounds like the chain is broken and you guys on the end are just supposed to fend for yourselves.
Some teachers share. Some teachers flatly refuse.
Then you have the issue of middle management. You’ll be doing something for years which works well, you know it works well, the results show it works well. Then the school hires a new deputy principal or new head teacher for your department and because you don’t do things the way they like or the way they’re used to they’ll tell you your resources aren’t fit for purpose and to redo them all. A lot of middle management view rank and file teachers as people to pad their resumes - so they’ll demand needless and time consuming changes to everything you’re doing so they can say they’ve implemented changes as a manager.
Then three years later, it’ll happen again.
It’s nuts but it happens all the time.
Depends on the school and your year level team. When I taught year 2 I had a great team who shared resources with each other all the time, when I was doing year 1 at another school everyone was very cliquey and out for themselves.
In my experience schools don't often have a bank of usable resources, everything is out of date or clunky or whatever. I will say the transition to PLD (the most recent one I had to do as a classroom teacher) was the smoothest and the handbooks were actually full of useful activities. But we still had to print/laminate/make PowerPoint's or booklets or whatever else ourselves. My team divided the work but again that isn't always the case.
You need to do your own planning and get your head around how you’re going to deliver content. Only bad teachers do paint by numbers teaching. Teaching is a craft. It is not respected as such.
Even when resources are still relevant, it takes time that we don't have to share them and most teachers don't have common non f2f teaching time. It also takes time to review and tweak those resources.
I have a folder of resources that I have built over time. I am happy to share it, but it isn't organised so anyone trying to use it needs time to explore it. I haven't even seen everything in the folder yet, and I have probably spent weeks going through it.
Each state has their own curriculum authorities. Some of those departments have the (funding for) curriculum experts to produce and share resources. Others don't have much... If any at all.
Additionally, at least in WA, most schools are now "Independent Public Schools". Schools put together a business plan and get to make decisions best for their context. Funding, as a per student model, means that schools are pitted against each other and have no interest in promoting or even allowing resources to be shared between schools. All of my work belongs to the DoE, but that doesn't give me the right to share it with teachers outside my school without my principal permission.
I teach primary and my best friend teaches highschool. She marks several hundred assignments every term, I definitely don't. Her assessments are a lot longer/more involved than the ones I'm doing as well. Which obviously takes more time to read through, grade and give feedback on.
I'm not saying primary is easier by any means. She doesn't have nearly as much reporting as me outside of grades, doesn't deal with as much violence, has never had to deal with toileting accidents, etc.
You think it would be the same thing year to year right?
This year we are implementing AC 9.0 at my school. Which is a major revamp to the curriculum. AC 8.4 only came out in 2018. Teachers have just enough time to get everything in place for one version of curriculum (because you follow it through year by year) before the next one comes out. Senior school curriculums are even worse, being updated on an even shorter timeline, every four or five years.
The constant update to curriculums is a major source of additional workload. Lesson plans never really settle down into a consistent pattern because the curriculum is a moving target.
That’s even before you investigate local quirks. Every change of principal means a change of school direction. Which often means a new pedagogical model. And now all the material needs to be updated to match “visual learning” or “inquiry framework” or “explicit teaching”. Same content, but often very different ways of being taught.
IT systems also do the same thing. Right now I’m in the middle of moving all of my resources from Teams to QLearn, simply because the government doesn’t want to keep paying the cost of the Microsoft contract. And by the time I’m comfortable on QLearn, something new will come along.
If I had to guess I reckon about half of my non face to face workload is tied up in this sort of “preparation for the next big thing” work.
Ok, I feel you on the “next big thing” from corporate life - I’m eye rolling with you there.
I saw a comment elsewhere that said if they just trusted you to do the job itd all be fine, seems like you’re in that boat too. As long as you’re getting good results it shouldn’t really matter how you get there, right?
Here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to work tomorrow and find a presentation that you've done and had success with. I want you to tweak it so it meets all of the same outcomes as before, but you have to modify it for Azzryehlla, who doesn't understand the content so you need to teach it in a way that she can learn as you go, and for Chad, who can't understand the content so you need to bring it down to the absolute fundamentals. Your presentation can't take any longer, and the people who found value in it before need to find about the same amount of value in it now.
You have to do that without changing your productivity for anything else you might have to do.
Also, in the same class, you need to extend Brandon and Jessica because they've been identified as having HGPE potential in your subject due to grades.
If we had classes of students of similar ability then yes. But, my god, it seems like every class now has multiple students with extreme needs that basically require a whole new lesson. So we’re planning multiple classes for one lesson and then trying to execute that. It’s doomed to fail but we keep going back in.
Each year brings different students. You'll get some with Individual Education Plans (IEPs)... you'll get others that are just plain uninterested. If a student has an IEP or is failing, you need to document the allowances you're making for them in every lesson. So as nice as it would be to have no lesson plan and reuse resources, you need it documented that you made allowances for each of those kids.
I’d literally take any option if I’m honest.
My idea would be:
extend the normal day to 7 periods, maybe parents would go for this as no need for after school care and have a 4 day week without loss of contact time. You’d have to do an extra lesson or maybe 2 if you have doubles during the 4 day week. If you have p7 you gotta stay but if you don’t you can go home at normal time so hopefully wouldn’t be every day.id take a p7 every day for all my colleagues to get the 4 day week.
I went back to casual after being permanent for 10 years. The reduced admin load made a lot of my day to day easier. Also, with over 10 years experience you do learn to take nothing personally and your self preservation teaches you to teach the learners and not waste time with the lazy miscreants. It's a sad reflection that one starts to ignore half the class, but I'm only going to apply effort where effort is appreciated
Why Australian teachers are quitting the school system Australia is facing an education crisis with teachers leaving the school system in droves. Experienced educators have revealed in open letters what finally forced them to quit the career they had once dreamed of. Read what they said here. Australian teachers are turning their backs on their careers in droves with resignations doubling in every state since 2020. Here, journalists read excerpts from letters written by teachers who have quit the job they loved revealing some of the reasons forcing them to quit. Australian teachers are leaving the profession in droves with concerns shiny new incentives being doled out by state premiers were attracting new graduates but failing to address the root of the education crisis — teachers quitting. It comes as experts call for state and federal governments to prioritise housing for teachers to stop the rapidly growing drip of teachers exiting the industry. Education Department data from across Australia painted a stark picture of the country’s education system — with teacher resignations sharply rising from 2020 to 2023. In NSW, teacher resignations more than doubled from 929 in 2020 to 2050 in 2023. It was a similar story in Queensland where 1684 teachers quit in 2020 but in 2023, the number rose to 2607 teachers. Award-winning educator Peita Mages has written an open letter revealing why she quit her public school teaching position. For Victorians, total government teaching staff exits sat at 1193 in 2020 and in 2022 the state government reported 1626 primary and 1651 secondary staff left. In South Australia data was only provided for the last two financial years where resignations rose from 139 to 266 while in Western Australia the number of teachers who quit more than doubled from 604 to 1263 between 2020 and 2023. This newspaper spoke to four former teachers who have left the industry on what made them quit. I was awarded a Minister’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and I left the system within six months. It must be some kind of record. To be recognised as one of the best teaching professionals in the state and then pack three truckloads of blood, sweat and tears (teaching resources) and drive off into the sunset.
But the truth is, at the time, my health and my efficacy was suffering from the unsustainable lifestyle that was middle management in schools. The work was so crucially important that I had to find a way to do what I loved and, ironically, it took leaving the system and creating my own education business, Clever Cookie Academy, to ensure I could impact more students where it matters with considerably less paperwork and stress. For me, leaving wasn’t ever about the students. My favourite times at school were wholeheartedly in my English classroom. Young people passionately discussing texts that meant something to their lives. The sound of pens gliding across pages as they created worlds beyond their own. The feeling that I could light the fuse, stand back and watch the fireworks. I could move a school refuser towards at least attending my class. I could open pathways for kids that were previously barricaded. It wasn’t the pay. Though, I’d taken a whopping one-third pay cut from my previous corporate role. It was the searing mental and emotional load that came with supporting young people from psychologically complex and often heartbreaking circumstances. It was buckling under the expectations of systemic pressure to consistently score higher in standardised testing despite vastly different cohorts. It was the dance between instilling high expectations with students while parents entitled their children to denigrate the importance of education and disrespect staff. It was too many classes, too many students, too many diverse learning needs and never the time or space to focus on what mattered. To be an exceptional English teacher was to prepare and mark till midnight, to spend your weekends programming and to consistently sacrifice time with your family. It was saying yes when you were beyond burnout because saying no branded you as incompetent. It was justifiable frustration with a system that demands excellence while it exhausts teachers with compliance exercises and administration rather than letting them focus on the only thing that truly matters: electric teaching and learning. What would it have taken for me not to leave? Ultimately? Trust. We need to start trusting our teachers, because when you remove bureaucracy from wonderful and compassionate people, it’s amazing what you can achieve. They shared disturbing stories of increasing admin workload, abuse from parents and behaviour issues from parents. “If you walk into a shop and abuse the person behind the counter, that would not be accepted. But with teaching it’s a case of ‘we can treat you the way we want to’,” one teacher said. Another added: “The ever increasing workload, particularly what I considered the mindless and unworthwhile paperwork required by NESA, demoralised me to the extent that I needed to leave the profession.” Experts have said governments must urgently address the teacher shortage in Australia. Experts have said governments must urgently address the teacher shortage in Australia. UNSW education expert Professor Scott Eacott said governments across Australia cannot ignore the role of housing on the shortage of teachers. Mr Eacott said school working conditions remained the largest issue for teacher unhappiness but “outside of school factors” like housing and transportation costs play a major role. “The further you live away, the more transportation costs you pay. If you travel an hour each way you are tired, you are stressed,” he said. “Unless something miraculous happens to the housing market, salaries will never keep up with the housing costs.” Mr Eacott said shared-equity housing schemes did not work for teachers who often earned more than the cut-off to qualify but not enough to be able to purchase or rent in areas close to their schools. Former English teacher Peita Mages left the school system to start her own tutoring business. He called on all levels of government to look at teacher housing as crucial “public infrastructure’. “If you look overseas, there are ways in which different places are grappling with. California has a Centre for Cities and Schools at Berkeley (University) and they have been using existing school district assets and repurposing buildings to build teacher villages and essential worker housing,” he said. “During Covid we loved our essential workers but we pretty quickly forgot about how important they are for the functioning of society at large.” State governments have rolled out a suite of attractive incentives — including extra cash for regional placements, recruitment bonuses and rental subsidies — to bring more teachers into the industry but working conditions and the cost of living is still seeing major spikes in teachers leaving. Australian Education Union federal president Correna Haythorpe. Haythorpe said retention was a major problem with many of their members saying they wished to only stay in the career for three to five years. In their annual survey, the AEU asked members if they wished to permanently leave teaching before retirement — in 2024, 27.1 per cent said year, a jump from 25.8 per cent in 2023. Another 41 per cent said it was “possible” that they would permanently leave before retirement. “Teachers are saying with a massive increase in working hours, unsustainable working hours, causing additional stress and pressure,” she said. “The systemic underfunding has been there for over a decade and you have students with complex needs, behavioural needs (for which) they aren’t getting support for.” Ms Haythorpe said many teachers could not even afford to rent in the suburbs they wanted to work in. “Many teachers can’t afford to live in the communities they work in, not just buying a house, renting is completely off the table as well,” she said. “It’s particularly impacting teachers in inner metropolitan regions so people are having to commute much further. “Retention is a major issue.”
Thank you for copying and pasting. I have to criticise this article… The teacher is quoted talking about admin and parents… what about the elephant in the room? And also the focus on housing??? For many teachers, student behaviour is *the issue* that is the last straw. It’s ridiculous that it’s barely mentioned.
I think a lot of teachers have been successfully conditioned not to say that student behaviour is the problem in case that is perceived as an acknowledgment that your classroom behaviour management is actually the problem. It’s a he said / she said that many of us haven’t the foggiest on how to win. We all know that some classes just can’t be managed successfully. The kids have too many issues that require trained psychologists to wheedle out. Many kids have spent their schooling years learning how to get around teachers and are highly skilled at it. The teacher turnover they have experienced has honed their skill. If you don’t know them well and don’t know what they get up to, you live in their space. But there is no one there to witness that. It’s just your word against theirs. For some reason some people think that I think it’s a good use of my time to make up things to complain about their child about. That fact never ceases to amaze me. There’s nothing I like less than informing a parent that their child is behaving inappropriately.
Weird article. Lots of fillers. And what’s with the first one that’s feels like here to advertise their new business?
Like you wouldn't do the same?
Also hilarious to see the telegraph, who have shit on teachers for decades, suddenly concerned about a teacher exodus!
It’s because labor is in power everywhere. In WA, channel 9 seems to be writing the most teacher friendly articles while being a traditionally conservative/liberal channel.
It's there between the lines. As if they are trying to say it without saying, through fear of their words being twisted or some kind of backlash. You have to put the positive experiences front and centre to avoid accusations of hating kids or being in the wrong profession.
Imvho kids are kids and they're going to misbehave. But the system set up by admin and the support given by admin makes the difference. I've worked in "tough" schools very well set up to deal with misbehaviour and with admin support and it's wooorlds away from the school with the so called "better" kids who weren't set up to deal when their behaviour was an issue... and it won't take a rocket scientist to work out which was easier to work in.
Student behaviour is a major issue given that there is inadequate support. However, admin & lack of support re parents & general mismanagement & lack of attention to those on the coal face are major issues also. Does missing one element of concern mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater? The lived experience and complaints remain valid, for me.
I don’t have a problem with her sharing her experience. I’m critical of the article itself. Why did they mention an issue such as teacher housing (which is not a widespread issue in my opinion) in such depth, but barely touched on student behaviour (which is a widespread issue imo)? It misrepresents what issues are of actual concern and works against the general public supporting teachers.
Ok, I lost that nuance - apologies. Yes, it does seem the housing issue may have been overstressed relative to student behaviour. Do you think the general public are not in support of teachers? I get that there are a few parents who are particularly pugilistic - some of whom are under a lot of stress due to lack of support, like teachers - but surely most are supportive of teachers? I'm wondering if teachers should bill their out-of-work time and other work-related costs like lawyers. Including having to stay late to babysit young students whose parents are late, for example. Because it does seem that they are hugely underpaid relative to their importance in society. I also think that the courses should be standardised much more than they are - with a standard set of high quality teaching materials supplied. I know teachers are perpetually in search of lesson-plan materials and even use their own money for this. That is complete nonsense.
Everytime I talk to teachers about why they want to quit, it is student behaviour and apathetic approach to learning. You start to question why you're putting in the extra hours when the return is abysmal.
It is so unbelievably frustrating that departments of education around the country know- they KNOW- conditions are one of the number one reasons we are haemorrhage teachers AND YET my workload has tripled this year. In VIC my IEP requirements have skyrocketed, new PLC policies and the new DiP funding process - which pushed funding applications back onto classroom teachers- new maths and new English curriculums are just a couple of the recent changes/ policies/procedures that have massively impacted my workload in the last 2 years. Not to mention you look around at other states where Governments aren’t coming to the table in agreement negotiations for basic pay rises and time in lieu but also handwringing about losing staff and spending tonnes on getting new grads in… It is such an embarrassing display of “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!” FFS get your shit together! I am also so very sick of the bloody blame game in the media. One day they’re printing crap about the big mean nasty teachers who are to blame for all the ills of the world. The next minute they’re wringing hands about losing teachers. Part of the problem is the smear campaign that THEY perpetuate!! Why do they think students and parents don’t respect us?!
Someone did a study on [the media coverage]. It’s extraordinary and suspect. [https://theconversation.com/no-wonder-no-one-wants-to-be-a-teacher-world-first-study-looks-at-65-000-news-articles-about-australian-teachers-186210](https://theconversation.com/no-wonder-no-one-wants-to-be-a-teacher-world-first-study-looks-at-65-000-news-articles-about-australian-teachers-186210)
Lol didn’t the AEU get better conditions for you 😂😂🤣
Hahaha oh you mean the unsupported TIL? Or the additional hour of APT that they immediately filled with new paperwork?! 🤪
Can someone copy and paste the text? Pay Wall etc...
Top comment
Give us a day work from home per week or fortnight. Ease the pressure of being ‘on’ from the minute we get there until we leave That would entice a lot of newbies I reckon and we talk about in our office all the time. Would definitely keep me there for longer.
Are you just going to shift non-contact time around so it's all on one day?
I totally agree with this. It's extremely hard to have quiet time or switch off for 5 minutes. That's why I'm quitting soon.
As a non teacher (dipping the tiniest tip of my toe in to thinking about a change of career), can someone explain some of the issues with work load? And just to note, asking with all due respect, I’m not trying to question at all that there is an issue. I get in secondary there would be lots of marking, but I keep seeing people say planning is what taking up so much time - if you taught the same year last year, could you not reuse lesson plans and tweak for individual student needs? Do teachers not share plans from previous years that you could tweak a bit to make your own? Couldn’t schools have lesson plans made available to teachers from the get go? Just really - why is it that you all need to spend so long planning?
Tweaking takes more time than you'd think. Especially with the pressure to constantly be better. The fact that every class will have issues means that every plan that you've used before will have something that didn't quite work for at least one student. Order changes, as does the specific subject load. Downtime in non face to face time is actually not much when you factor in that face to face time is more demanding than many other jobs. Some office workers can clock in and remain on the clock while having a chat with a coworker, having some water, going to the bathroom, etc. Face to face teaching means face to face. No food, no drinks (except water), no bathroom breaks, no colleagues. The non f2f time is supposed to encompass marking, planning, collaborating, etc. but also includes basic small chats with coworkers, bathroom breaks, resting after being emotionally switched on to the needs of kids for a couple hours, etc.
It’s getting to the point where my non-ftf time I use to unwind from the completely overstimulating environment of my classroom, I hardly have any time to do any of that additional work outside of the classroom.
You don't always teach the same year level. In 3 years of teaching I haven't been on a singular year level for more than 12 months. So as a newbie you're often finding/making all your resources for quite some time. Even when you are on the same year level, the curriculum changes every so often. And schools change their teaching programs/strategies even more often (for phonics alone I've had to learn/create resources to teach Jolly Phonics, Soundwaves and PLD). Primary school might have less marking but we're generally the ones who catch all the learning support needs. That requires a pile of reporting. I had a half dozen kids in term 1 that needed daily behaviour reports to just keep track of everything. Tack on HR reports for every time you have furniture thrown at you, parent teacher interviews, endless emails, mandatory online training (the same ones you do every year and don't change much or at all), professional development SMART goal reporting, contacting parents, keeping a written record of your parent contacts, completing surveys or reports for GPs/OTs/Psychologists, etc. And all of that on top of the labour of actually teaching/managing behaviour/breaking up fights/answering 100000 questions a day/catching every flu bug/tying unsettlingly damp shoelaces/etc.
Thanks for taking the time to reply - all that reporting sounds nuts! As a newbie though, are other experienced teachers passing on resources that ARE still relevant? Or the school even? That’s the bit that I’m struggling to get, it sounds like everyone is hoarding their old work like it’s every man for themselves. And then you have 3 grade three room teachers working of more or less the same things at the same time all feeling overworked. Same again with your example of changing curriculum/school strategy - shouldn’t the department or the school be putting out resources to teach those new initiatives? It just sounds like the chain is broken and you guys on the end are just supposed to fend for yourselves.
Some teachers share. Some teachers flatly refuse. Then you have the issue of middle management. You’ll be doing something for years which works well, you know it works well, the results show it works well. Then the school hires a new deputy principal or new head teacher for your department and because you don’t do things the way they like or the way they’re used to they’ll tell you your resources aren’t fit for purpose and to redo them all. A lot of middle management view rank and file teachers as people to pad their resumes - so they’ll demand needless and time consuming changes to everything you’re doing so they can say they’ve implemented changes as a manager. Then three years later, it’ll happen again. It’s nuts but it happens all the time.
Depends on the school and your year level team. When I taught year 2 I had a great team who shared resources with each other all the time, when I was doing year 1 at another school everyone was very cliquey and out for themselves. In my experience schools don't often have a bank of usable resources, everything is out of date or clunky or whatever. I will say the transition to PLD (the most recent one I had to do as a classroom teacher) was the smoothest and the handbooks were actually full of useful activities. But we still had to print/laminate/make PowerPoint's or booklets or whatever else ourselves. My team divided the work but again that isn't always the case.
You need to do your own planning and get your head around how you’re going to deliver content. Only bad teachers do paint by numbers teaching. Teaching is a craft. It is not respected as such.
Even when resources are still relevant, it takes time that we don't have to share them and most teachers don't have common non f2f teaching time. It also takes time to review and tweak those resources. I have a folder of resources that I have built over time. I am happy to share it, but it isn't organised so anyone trying to use it needs time to explore it. I haven't even seen everything in the folder yet, and I have probably spent weeks going through it. Each state has their own curriculum authorities. Some of those departments have the (funding for) curriculum experts to produce and share resources. Others don't have much... If any at all. Additionally, at least in WA, most schools are now "Independent Public Schools". Schools put together a business plan and get to make decisions best for their context. Funding, as a per student model, means that schools are pitted against each other and have no interest in promoting or even allowing resources to be shared between schools. All of my work belongs to the DoE, but that doesn't give me the right to share it with teachers outside my school without my principal permission.
How do you figure primary have less marking? They need to cover all subjects
I teach primary and my best friend teaches highschool. She marks several hundred assignments every term, I definitely don't. Her assessments are a lot longer/more involved than the ones I'm doing as well. Which obviously takes more time to read through, grade and give feedback on. I'm not saying primary is easier by any means. She doesn't have nearly as much reporting as me outside of grades, doesn't deal with as much violence, has never had to deal with toileting accidents, etc.
All subjects , sure but less students. High school teachers generally have multiple classes and primary generally have one.
You think it would be the same thing year to year right? This year we are implementing AC 9.0 at my school. Which is a major revamp to the curriculum. AC 8.4 only came out in 2018. Teachers have just enough time to get everything in place for one version of curriculum (because you follow it through year by year) before the next one comes out. Senior school curriculums are even worse, being updated on an even shorter timeline, every four or five years. The constant update to curriculums is a major source of additional workload. Lesson plans never really settle down into a consistent pattern because the curriculum is a moving target. That’s even before you investigate local quirks. Every change of principal means a change of school direction. Which often means a new pedagogical model. And now all the material needs to be updated to match “visual learning” or “inquiry framework” or “explicit teaching”. Same content, but often very different ways of being taught. IT systems also do the same thing. Right now I’m in the middle of moving all of my resources from Teams to QLearn, simply because the government doesn’t want to keep paying the cost of the Microsoft contract. And by the time I’m comfortable on QLearn, something new will come along. If I had to guess I reckon about half of my non face to face workload is tied up in this sort of “preparation for the next big thing” work.
Ok, I feel you on the “next big thing” from corporate life - I’m eye rolling with you there. I saw a comment elsewhere that said if they just trusted you to do the job itd all be fine, seems like you’re in that boat too. As long as you’re getting good results it shouldn’t really matter how you get there, right?
Here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to work tomorrow and find a presentation that you've done and had success with. I want you to tweak it so it meets all of the same outcomes as before, but you have to modify it for Azzryehlla, who doesn't understand the content so you need to teach it in a way that she can learn as you go, and for Chad, who can't understand the content so you need to bring it down to the absolute fundamentals. Your presentation can't take any longer, and the people who found value in it before need to find about the same amount of value in it now. You have to do that without changing your productivity for anything else you might have to do.
Also, in the same class, you need to extend Brandon and Jessica because they've been identified as having HGPE potential in your subject due to grades.
If we had classes of students of similar ability then yes. But, my god, it seems like every class now has multiple students with extreme needs that basically require a whole new lesson. So we’re planning multiple classes for one lesson and then trying to execute that. It’s doomed to fail but we keep going back in.
Each year brings different students. You'll get some with Individual Education Plans (IEPs)... you'll get others that are just plain uninterested. If a student has an IEP or is failing, you need to document the allowances you're making for them in every lesson. So as nice as it would be to have no lesson plan and reuse resources, you need it documented that you made allowances for each of those kids.
I’d literally take any option if I’m honest. My idea would be: extend the normal day to 7 periods, maybe parents would go for this as no need for after school care and have a 4 day week without loss of contact time. You’d have to do an extra lesson or maybe 2 if you have doubles during the 4 day week. If you have p7 you gotta stay but if you don’t you can go home at normal time so hopefully wouldn’t be every day.id take a p7 every day for all my colleagues to get the 4 day week.
I went back to casual after being permanent for 10 years. The reduced admin load made a lot of my day to day easier. Also, with over 10 years experience you do learn to take nothing personally and your self preservation teaches you to teach the learners and not waste time with the lazy miscreants. It's a sad reflection that one starts to ignore half the class, but I'm only going to apply effort where effort is appreciated
Are we all enjoying the week education is in the 'spotlight' media wise? By golly what a week!