It’s pretty hard to find anyone who seems to be loving their job at the moment.
A pandemic in its third year, a community desperate to move on and a virus that has no regard for the state of the world that existed before it started killing people.
Add to that the perilous state of the economy with prices up, interest rates up, workloads up, pretty much everything up — except for wages.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that the teaching workforce would be no different — tired, burnt out and feeling underpaid and undervalued.
It wasn’t all that long ago that parents across the country were getting firsthand experience of what it’s like to educate their children for seven hours a day.
Now everyone’s back in the classroom, teacher shortages are biting and something’s got to give.
Ministers in unison
The issues engulfing the sector aren’t new but have undoubtedly been exacerbated as the specter of coronavirus continues to loom.
An issues paper released ahead of yesterday’s meeting of education ministers pointed to perceptions of low pay, unfavorable working conditions and increasing workloads as responsible for an “unprecedented” staffing challenge that was the “single biggest issue” facing all school sectors.
On that, all state ministers were in unison on Friday.
Sarah Mitchell wants the federal government to consider fast-tracking the path to citizenship for teachers coming to Australia.(ABC News: Timothy Swanston)
“No matter which state minister would be speaking to you now, we’re all dealing with the same issues and challenges,” NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said after the meeting.
“We all know we’ve got fantastic teachers working in all of our schools day in, day out. We need to be working on ways to keep them there.”
But if the teachers at their wits’ end were looking to a meeting of the nation’s education ministers for a sign that all their issues would soon be resolved, they’d have been left wanting.
Their pain has been heard, smiling ministers reassured as they pledged to act. But what exactly they will do remains unclear.
three priorities
Labor frontbencher Tanya Plibersek spent six years in opposition honoring her party’s education policies.
Now in government, the job has been handed to Jason Clare, who agreed yesterday’s meeting in Canberra.
He’s faced the unenviable task of taking on a portfolio in the middle of a storm having had little experience in the policy area.
Tanya Plibersek was expected to retain the education portfolio in government.(ABC News: Matt Roberts)
That’s maybe why he’s often referred to his mother’s experiences working in schools and the power they have to transform lives.
But as for the policies that he’s keen to implement to make that happen — more time is needed.
Clare left yesterday’s meeting declaring three priorities: to encourage more people into teaching, to better prepare students for the workforce and to keep the teachers the sector already has.
Education department secretaries from across the country will now prepare a national action plan that will be presented to the ministers when they next meet in December.
Is it more than talk?
Clare was quick to dismiss any suggestion that the meeting had just been a talkfest.
“It’s not just talking,” he said.
“By listening to teachers, we got ideas we didn’t have before today.
“So today was about listening to teachers, harvesting those good ideas and now working on a plan that we can now implement to make a real difference.”
Teachers are reportedly often working in excess of 50 hours a week.(AAP: Mick Tsikas)
It would be baffling if yesterday was the first chance any of these ministers had to hear from teachers.
But after hearing from each of them, just having everyone at the table and working together sounded like progress.
“Today was a breath of fresh air,” WA’s Education Minister Sue Ellery said.
“These meetings have been really difficult over the last few years and I’ve been coming to them for the last five years.”
There’s little love lost in the Labor states over the removal of a federal Coalition education minister.
The NSW minister, herself a Coalition minister, didn’t seem particularly saddened either.
So, if they’re all now at the table and working together, it might well mean there’s a chance to save an education sector on the brink.
Frankly, they have no other option.
That’s the biggest bargaining chip teachers have — we need schools and they need to be staffed, preferably by teachers who want to be there and feel appreciated.
If COVID taught us anything, it’s that we can’t take that for granted.
Five days a week, Karl* goes to work as a high school teacher, planning lessons, marking tests, and dealing with admin. Then, on Sundays, he puts on his uniform and works a sixth day at a local shop.
It’s a long week even though, technically, he’s a part-time teacher.
Despite only being contracted to work two full days at the school — and three half-days — the amount of unpaid overtime needed to prepare for the next day’s classes quickly fills the spare time.
Which is exactly why Karl chose not to take on full-time teaching when he recently graduated, despite a widespread shortage of Australian teachers.
“I kept hearing horror stories of the first-year — early teachers they burn out, they struggle, and I was concerned about it,” he says. “I haven’t sat through a degree so I can do a job for a couple of years and then burnout. I want to do this for a long time, so I need to pace myself.”
Horror stories, like those that led Karl to choose his phased entry into the profession, have become all too common in the teaching industry.
Correna Haythorpe, the national president of the Australian Education Union (AEU) which represents public school teachers across the country, believes the attrition rate for teachers could be as high as 30 per cent within the first five years in some parts of the country.
The cause is often chalked up to “burnout”, a far-reaching condition that can be driven by ballooning workloads, the expansion of responsibility and periods of high stress, like the COVID pandemic.
“The big word that I would use to describe what’s happening to teachers is demoralisation,” says Gabbie Stroud, a former teacher (or “recovering teacher”, as she describes it) and author of a book about her own burnout.
Former teacher Gabbie Stroud recently answered the call to return to casual teaching due to staff shortages. (Supplied: Gabbie Stroud)
“But how that’s happening is broad and varied: it’s increasing workload, it’s data collection, administration and standardization, and all of those activities that take teachers away from the core business of teaching.”
These issues and more will form part of a roundtable discussion between national, state and territory education ministers on Friday, as they look for ways to attract new teachers to the profession, retain existing staff and stem the chronic shortages plaguing schools.
It comes as Department of Education modeling revealed demand for high school teachers was set to outstrip graduates by more than 4,000 over the next three years.
An issues paper published by the department ahead of the meeting described the staffing challenges as “unprecedented” and the “single biggest issue” facing all school sectors.
While COVID had exacerbated the issue, it said that it was only one part of the problem and perceptions of low pay, unfavorable working conditions, and increasing workloads were also partly to blame.
All these factors contributed to Karl’s decision to go part-time, despite choosing to get into the industry precisely because he saw an opportunity for increased job security.
Even in his first year on the job, he says he’s regularly working upwards of five hours above what he is contracted for each week — a situation he describes as a “pretty common story.”
“I’ve got a lot of teachers around me, and even when they’ve got 10 or 20 years experience, they’re going: ‘yeah, wow, this is nuts’,” he says. “There’s a lot of dazed looks, I don’t want to overstate it, but people are walking around like the walking dead, really knocked around.”
How did we get here?
While teacher shortages — especially in certain regions and for particular subjects — aren’t new, Haythorpe says the current situation “is like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”
“We’re in a perfect storm right now and this is happening right across the nation. It’s not only schools in rural and regional locations that are experiencing shortages,” she says. “There’s no doubt that we’re at crisis point.”
Stroud, who left her job as a primary school teacher in 2016 due to what she believed was burnout, says she prefers the term “teacher drought” to shortage, because “when we think about a drought then we start to think about what’s happening in the environment to cause this”.
Teachers are reportedly often working in excess of 50 hours a week.(AAP: Mick Tsikas)
“I suspect that if everyone who held a teaching degree went back into teaching, we would not have a shortage. So, something has driven them out,” she says. And what’s particularly alarming, she says, is how quickly early career teachers are tapping out.
So, what’s causing it? People we spoke to for this story repeated that workload is the major — if not the number one — issue. According to Haythorpe, teachers are frequently working in excess of 50 hours a week (the standard full-time working week is 38 hours), a figure which is only growing. “COVID exacerbated that but it didn’t create the problem,” she says.
Many teachers also report feeling unprepared to enter the classroom, she says, due to increased expectations to deal with behavioral issues and the need to keep up with changing curriculums.
Earlier this year, a Grattan Institute survey of more than 5,000 teachers and school leaders found more than 90 per cent of teachers felt they didn’t have enough time to prepare adequately for classroom teaching and many said they felt overwhelmed by expectations.
It’s a familiar story to Chris*, who left his job in a mainstream high school after almost 30 years due to a case of burnout that left him in need of psychological treatment. Asked what led him to that point, he rattles off a long list: loss of status, bureaucracy, isolation, and as always, workload.
“If people didn’t have mortgages to pay, there would be no senior teachers left,” he says. “It’s not about the money, it’s about the workload … smaller classes, less administrative burden.”
Stroud echoes a similar sentiment, that more money isn’t the answer for teachers already in the deep end. “Burnout is burnout, demoralization is demoralization,” she says. “The day I left that classroom, you could have told me it was a million dollar a year job and I still would have left.”
How does pay stack up?
The reality, however, is that when it comes to employment money does matter — especially when it comes to attracting high-achievers to the profession and retaining experienced teachers with a myriad of transferable skills.
It’s also part of the equation for Karl as he considers when he might want to make the move to full-time. “Do I want to risk burning myself out for $75,000 a year? No. Once I’m worth $100,000 a year, is it worth maybe increasing it then?” he says. “Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it is the extra spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.”
According to a 2019 report from the Grattan Institute, the starting salary for most classroom teachers in Australia is between $65,000 and $70,000, topping out at just over $100,000 after about a decade in the workforce. While the starting salary is competitive with other professions, over time teachers quickly fall behind their peers in other industries.
Among proposals to be discussed on Friday is a plan to give some senior teachers a 40 per cent pay bump to take on so-called “master teacher” roles. Paid teaching internships for professionals from other industries are also on the table.
New federal Education Minister Jason Clare will meet with his state and territory counterparts on Friday to discuss widespread teacher shortages. (AAP: Aaron Bunch)
“One thing is certain, we’re not going to fix this problem by just doing the same thing time after time,” federal Education Minister Jason Clare told the ABC last week. “We’ve got to look for new ideas that are going to help not just fix the shortage of teachers but also raise the performance of our kids.”
The Grattan Institute has previously recommended a similar framework to retain and attract people to the workforce, including the creation of two new expert teacher roles that would be paid at a significantly higher salary.
“One of the really key strategies, we believe, to support the workforce going forward is to get much better at recognizing teaching expertise,” says Jordana Hunter, education program director at the Grattan Institute.
“We’ve called for several years now for a reboot of the teacher career structure to introduce an instructional specialist position — a person who is able to demonstrate exceptional, subject-specific teaching practice and has the ability to work with other teachers in their school .”
Haythorpe of the AEU acknowledges the need to find ways to attract teachers to the classroom, but worries about proposals that “pit teachers against teachers”.
“One of my concerns with the master teacher proposal is it really focuses on a small, select group of teachers. This is a problem for everyone and we need appropriate pay and conditions for everyone in the profession.”
So, what’s the solution?
When it comes to workload — something Hunter also says she hears time and time again — the Grattan Institute argues there needs to be a rethink of how teachers can best be supported so they’re able to focus on students.
“One of the things we’ve looked at is how we can free up teacher schedules, so they can really focus on teaching,” Hunter says.
This may look like redeploying teaching assistants and other non-teaching staff to take on extracurricular and supervision activities, allowing teachers more time for lesson planning and academic preparation.
Hunter says they also heard from more than half the teachers they surveyed that they feel like they’re expected to “reinvent the wheel” when it comes to lesson planning. “It’s really hitting students hard … this lack of time for teachers to think really carefully about how they’re going to deliver their lessons because instead they’re scrambling on Google and Pintrest.”
One way to alleviate this pressure, according to the Grattan Institute, could be the creation at a school level of high-quality lesson plans that are made available to all teachers to draw upon.
While there are plenty of details to be worked out, Hunter says one thing is clear: there’s no point reaching for a band-aid solution to the shortages without also dealing with the problems on the ground. “Obviously we need to address shortages, but we also have to make it a rewarding job now and keep the great teachers we already have in the classroom,” she says. “Because it’s one of the most important jobs in Australia.”
But while education leaders discuss where to go from here, the reality is already being felt in schools as they scramble for relief teachers and class numbers blow out.
For Gabbie Stroud, that means she could soon find herself somewhere she thought she’d never be again: at the front of the classroom.
A recent newsletter from her child’s school on the NSW south coast included a line begging local parents with a teaching degree to consider coming back to the classroom. “These are heartfelt pleas coming from our schools saying: ‘we’re not coping’,” she says.
So reluctantly, after six years out of the classroom, she’s signed up for casual relief teaching.
“I know it’s the right thing to step up and lend a hand,” she says. “But I don’t feel great about it. This is not the right way, none of this is the right way.”
Dire teacher shortages have pushed the federal government to consider radical reforms to get more people to take up the profession or stay longer.
Key points:
Federal government will table plan to give some senior teachers a 40 per cent pay rise
Under the plan, professionals who want to retrain to be teachers could be paid to learn on the job
The Australian Education Union said pay rises are needed across the board
Under a plan to be tabled at an emergency meeting of federal, state and territory education ministers next week, senior teachers could get a pay rise, while professionals who want to retrain to be teachers could be paid to learn on the job.
But a pay rise would not be for everyone. So-called “master teacher” or senior teaching positions would be awarded a 40 per cent wage boost.
With more children at school than ever before but fewer people lining up to become teachers, Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said it was time for a shake up.
“It’s serious and it’s getting worse,” he said.
“It’s not just because of the flu, not just because of COVID, it’s bigger than that.”
He said paid teaching internships were on the table for professionals from other industries who were doing a two-year masters degree in education.
“It’s a good idea to get people already in the workforce — mid-career professionals — to make the shift to the classroom.”
“If you can get people who have got qualifications into the classroom, that’s a good thing.”
Pay rises needed ‘across the board’, says union
Mr Clare admitted higher pay would be a major shift but said it would be up for discussion.
“One thing is certain, we’re not going to fix this problem by doing the same thing time after time,” he said.
“We’ve got to look for new ideas that are going to help, not just fix the shortage of teachers but also raise the performance of our kids.”
In terms of paying for the changes, Mr Clare said the state and federal governments would have to “work together”.
The Australian Education Union deputy president Meredith Peace said the paid internship option could work.
She said people with experience in other careers were already benefiting students in classrooms.
But she wasn’t convinced by the idea of master teachers with big pay rises, arguing a wage rise for all teachers would be fairer.
“I don’t think it’s a solution to pick out a small group of people and give them significant pay increases,” she said.
“This is a much more complex issue than that. We need proper career structures that reward high performing teachers who want to stay in the classroom.
“We need to provide decent salaries across the board.”
