In today’s classrooms, teachers are expected to care about everything – from student wellbeing and AI integration to attendance targets, parental complaints and reputational risks online. On top of that, they must remain calm, ever-available professionals who lift test scores and ‘add value’. But as the list of demands grows longer, so does the emotional toll.
Experts now argue that to survive – and thrive – in the profession, teachers may need to care less. Not about their students, but about the constant performance and bureaucratic box-ticking, so they can reinvest their energy into the meaningful, human connections that drew them to teaching in the first place.
Curtin University Senior Lecturer in Education Dr Saul Karnovsky has studied teacher wellbeing for more than 10 years and said Australian educators experience secondary traumatic stress at higher rates than paramedics, with burnout often blamed for choosing to leave the profession.
Below, The Educator speaks to Dr Karnovsky about Australia’s worsening teacher retention crisis, the intensifying emotional demands reshaping the profession, the systemic drivers of burnout, and the structural reforms needed to rebuild trust, reduce workload and retain experienced educators.
TE: What does the latest research show about teacher retention in Australia?
Recent research shows teacher retention in Australia is not improving. AITSL National Teacher Workforce Data collected from over 20,000 teachers shows that stress, workload and emotional exhaustion is driving high rates of intention to leave and burn out. Teachers report higher levels of psychological distress than the general workforce, and in some cases higher secondary traumatic stress (Silent Cost Report, The Flourish Movement) than emergency service workers. Importantly, this not because individual teachers lack resilience. It reflects a system that increasingly relies on teachers’ emotional labour while offering fewer structural supports, reduced professional trust, and escalating accountability demands.
TE: How and why has the job changed over the years?
Teaching has expanded well beyond classroom instruction of the past. Over time, policy reforms have layered new responsibilities onto teachers’ work in which they asked to care about things that have little to do with learning or connecting with young people. Endless assessment data collection, constant compliance reporting, student wellbeing and management systems surveillance, safeguarding online behaviour, and responding to an increasing array of complex social and economic issues. These shifts are driven by accountability regimes, market-style reforms, and a growing expectation that schools will compensate for broader social failures. As a result, teachers are asked to be educators, counsellors, data analysts, and crisis responders simultaneously. The emotional and cognitive load has intensified, while time, autonomy, and relational space, the foundations of good teaching, have steadily eroded.
TE: What are the most common reasons cited for teacher burnout?
Burnout is most linked to workload intensification, emotional exhaustion, and a lack of control over teachers’ work. Teachers describe being overwhelmed by administrative demands, constant monitoring, and the need to visibly perform care through data, standardised whole-wide programs, and mind-numbing documentation. At the same time, they carry the emotional weight of supporting students facing trauma, poverty, and mental health challenges, often without adequate resources. This is especially acute in hard to staff schools, regional and remote communities and contexts with a high level of economic disadvantage. Burnout emerges not because teachers care too little, but because they are required to care everywhere, all the time, and largely alone.
TE: What needs to be done to retain our teachers, by schools or policymakers?
Retention requires structural change, not more individual wellbeing programs. Mindfulness, mediation and yoga may work for some, but most find being asked to do these wellbeing practices onerous or that it contributes to toxic positivity in their workplaces. Schools and policymakers must reduce unnecessary compliance, rebuild professional trust, and give teachers time to do relational work well. This means fewer performative care requirements and more collective approaches to care, by allowing our teachers to care with students, families, colleagues, and leaders, rather than simply caring about them in prescribed ways. Sustainable workloads, supportive leadership, and shared responsibility for complex social issues are critical. Retaining teachers will depend on shifting away from exploitative models of care and toward systems that recognise care as relational, collective, and embedded, not something teachers should endlessly absorb on their own.