Teachers have issued a sharp warning to policymakers: stop confusing red tape with the real work of teaching. A new report by the McKell Institute says the path to productivity in schools isn’t about gutting the profession – it’s about cutting admin.
The ‘Freeing Teachers to Teach’ report, released in response to the Productivity Commission’s Building a Skilled and Adaptable Workforce inquiry, argues that reforms must support teachers, not sideline them. With a national teacher shortage biting hard, the report stresses that lesson planning is the beating heart of the job – not a bureaucratic add-on.
The Australian Education Union (AEU) has hit out at the Commission’s move to classify lesson planning as “administration,” calling it a backflip on its own 2023 recommendation to reduce admin so teachers could spend more time preparing for class.
“Lesson planning is at the core of the teaching profession. It is intellectual, creative, collaborative, and essential to tailoring teaching and learning for students,” AEU Federal President Correna Haythorpe said.
“Australia is in the midst of a teacher recruitment and retention crisis, driven by escalating workloads, and more than a decade of under funding for public schools. What is needed is investment in better wages and conditions and more resources for public schools.”
The McKell Institute report also emphasises that reforms proposed by the Productivity Commission risk reshaping the role of teachers into content deliverers rather than skilled educators, which Ms Haythorpe warns would worsen attrition and demoralise the profession.
“We cannot let ‘productivity’ become code for deskilling teachers. Teachers are highly skilled professionals, not content deliverers. Removing teaching autonomy from lesson planning would see more teachers leave the profession,” Haythorpe said.
The UN High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession highlights the importance of professional autonomy for teachers:
“Teacher autonomy and agency are important factors of job satisfaction, commitment and professional status,” the panel wrote.
“Teacher autonomy refers to the decisions over pedagogical approaches and curricula based on knowledge, competence, and responsibility within education goals. Teacher well-being is influenced by the degree of perceived work autonomy and directly relates to job satisfaction”
Haythorpe said productivity reforms must reduce red tape, not strip the heart out of teaching.
“Reducing teaching to the delivery of pre-packaged content risks undermining teacher expertise and narrowing their role,” she said.
The report explicitly highlights that redeploying genuine administrative and compliance work away from teachers could free up between 67 million and 106 million hours annually for lesson planning, collaboration, and teaching. This could restore up to 334 hours a year to each teacher in Australia for planning/collaboration and improved work/life balance.
It also states that supporting teacher wellbeing, reducing workload pressures, and creating pathways for long-term careers must be government priorities, as they are essential to student success and broader productivity.
“Genuine solutions to increase productivity include better pay and conditions, reducing administrative load, expanding support staff in schools, respecting teachers as professionals, and fully funding our public schools so that teachers can teach in and students can learn in modern, safe environments,” Haythorpe said.
“These solutions are good for teachers, good for students and good for our nation as a whole.”