In recent years, Australian schools have experienced a teacher shortage not seen since the 1970s, and it’s an issue that’s becoming more widespread as mounting workloads and worsening levels of stress plague the profession.
According to recent data from the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, up to 30% of teachers are considering leaving the profession before retirement age, and this comes at a time when student numbers are soaring, and academic outcomes are slipping.
On 15 December 2022, Federal, State, and Territory Education Ministers agreed on a National Teacher Workforce Action Plan, aimed at improving teacher supply, retaining teachers, revamping initial teacher education, elevating the profession, and better understanding future teacher workforce needs.
However, three years on, research shows that the stressors that are leading teachers to quit the profession are only worsening.
A new study by UNSW Sydney found more than two-thirds of teachers describe their workload as “largely or completely unmanageable”, with a staggering 90% reporting “severe stress”.
Professor Martin Mills has been an activist, a marathon runner, a teacher, an academic and a shaper of policy. He’s now on a mission to address Australia’s teacher shortage crisis and it’s not a problem only money can fix.
A research professor in the QUT School of Education in the Faculty of Creative Industries, Education & Social Justice, Professor Mills believes the answer lies in treating the teaching profession with greater respect as well as providing new teachers with better support including mentors.
Teachers want professional autonomy
Professor Mills said when teachers are asked what they need to stay in the job, more money, while important, is rarely the first answer.
“They want the freedom and time to be able to teach, and to have their voices heard by the education system,” Professor Mills told The Educator.
“When teachers talk about the joys of teaching, they speak of the ways they have come up with practices and curricula that have caused excitement and engagement amongst their students.”
Professor Mills said this shows that teachers are looking for the professional autonomy to make decisions that will engage their students.
“Many of the teachers we speak to through our different projects feel their voices have been ignored when it comes to educational reforms, that they are overwhelmed with administrative tasks that have little to do with their students’ learning, and that consequently much of the joy has been sucked out of teaching in the current moment.”
Surveillance and control eroding teachers’ trust
Professor Mills said teachers have become increasingly frustrated by the “hyper focus” on standardised tests, which they feel is diluting the impact of their core job.
“They don’t want to feel like they are part of a sausage factory,” Professor Mills said.
“While tracking and assessing how young people in classes are progressing is a necessary component of teaching, standardised tests have become the marker of this progression and have been used to evaluate both schools [or more accurately, principals] and teachers.”
Professor Mills said the reliance on standardised testing has reshaped school leadership in ways that are adding pressure on teachers.
“As a consequence of the evaluative impact of these tests on the quality of leadership within a school, many teachers feel that schools have put stress on to them through heightened surveillance and control, often through mandating practices that have been deemed as universally applicable to all students in all places from all backgrounds,” he said.
“Furthermore, many teachers feel that these tests do not capture what it is that they do in the classroom – ignored are the ways in which they have helped their students to develop inquisitiveness, to grow emotionally and socially, to think about their world and how to make it a better place for all to live in.”
Teaching deserves the same respect as law, medicine and engineering
Professor Mills said society must respect the profession and recognise that teaching is the equivalent of any other profession and looked up to as much as an engineer, a lawyer or a doctor.
“A significant part of teaching entails intellectual work and needs or be recognised as such,” he said.
“It requires deep subject knowledge, but that alone is not sufficient, teachers also need to understand the contexts and backgrounds from which the people in their classrooms come from, and they need to consider the appropriate pedagogical approaches to take with both the curriculum and the students in mind.”
Alongside this intellectual work, significant emotional demands – what some refer to as emotional labour – are placed on teachers, Professor Mills noted.
“Many students, and especially those who need the most help, come from very marginalised backgrounds and difficult out of school lives,” he said.
“For these students to succeed, teacher need to be able to build meaningful relationships with them. The complexity of this work requires significant professional judgements, as much as, if not more than, any other profession.”