Note: All teachers and employees at the Department of Education quoted in this piece chose to remain anonymous due to rules restricting unauthorised conversations with the media. Students, to protect their privacy, are also quoted without names.
Addressing a crowd of supporters in 2008, Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin was asked if she supported raising teacher pay and benefits. The response – “her reward is in heaven”– is emblematic of the dehumanising rhetoric educators face in the public discourse of almost every Western liberal democracy. While Australian politicians are not quite as blunt as Palin, teachers in Australia are almost constantly blamed for the failures of the education system alongside being demonised as radicals who act as a symbol of state influence on children.
Whether it be the former acting Education Minister Stuart Robert calling the ‘bottom’ 10% of teachers illiterate during the Morrison government, or former PM John Howard claiming teachers “abused their positions” by using the classroom to discuss an opposition to the Iraq War, teachers have for decades been the target of choice for conservative politicians suspicious of public institutions. The political associations of teaching with unionism and socialism date back to the early 20th century. Laws in Australia banned teachers even mentioning concepts like communism and atheism across the 1930s and 1940s. Those wars are still present. The fights over the ANZACs and Frontier Wars continue in classrooms today.
Being a traditionally female-dominated profession since the adoption of public education in the early 20th century, only 22% of current NSW schools teachers are men, teaching has also suffered deeply held misogynistic assumptions that classify female work as less intellectual or not worthy of praise at all.
More impactful, however, is how those wider political battles over who teachers are and what they believe erode society’s trust in the value they bring to society through public education. After talking to teachers, academics and students across many weeks, it became clear the structural reform required to fix chronic shortages, casualisation, and by extension workloads cannot occur without a national shift in how we perceive teachers and the intellectual nature of the work they do.
There is no question public schools are currently in a crisis. Almost 30,000 full time staff have left the system since 2010, citing terrible workplace conditions and some studies show the average public school teacher works an average 60.1 hours a week as opposed to the full time workload of 40 hours they are contracted for. There is currently a daily shortfall of over 3000 teachers in NSW. 87% of all public schools are impacted and on some days. Almost 10,000 lessons occur without a teacher at all.
For every teacher that leaves, the mental and professional burden on the rest increases dramatically. About 60% say they are planning or considering an exit in the next five years.
One teacher from Sydney’s Inner West told me “quitting is a daily conversation in the teachers lounge.” Another agreed saying “everyone these days has a clock in their mind…just waiting for the right time to step out.”
Empirically, the structural problems facing schools have nothing to do with teacher performance. NSW public schools are only funded at 89% of what they are supposed to be under the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) as of January 2024. Due to shortages, teachers are having to regularly plan and teach subjects outside of what they have been trained for. The after effects of the pandemic, which had profound consequences for the social maturity and mental well being of students, has also caused a spike in behaviour issues which include a 34% increase in assaults and other violent behaviour on school grounds since 2021.
Anyone who expects teachers to function, let alone thrive, in that environment is delusional – yet that is the dominant exception in the Australian media and public. A study by University of Sydney Professor Nicole Mockler on over 65,000 print and digital articles covering teaching between 1996 and 2020 found that in 2012 “teacher quality” was mentioned at a rate of 149 words per million while “education quality” was mentioned at a rate of only 58 words per million. Because they are the face of education, the structural issues facing the system are mapped onto teachers.
This manifests itself in uncomfortable confrontations with parents on the ground which the articles highlighted above only self-perpetuate. Only a small number of adults would question what painkiller a doctor gives them or their children but thousands of parents in Australian classrooms will pick at every small choice a teacher has to make. Teachers across Sydney told me parents have questioned them about their teaching styles, disciplinary methods, and even the content they teach and what order to teach it in.
One teacher with over 15 years’ experience in the public system summarised it well: “there is this constant idea that because you went to school as a young person, you are an expert in education.”
The wider policy implications of a media narrative dominated by teacher quality are staggering. Attempts at attracting teachers with incentives or improving teacher ‘standards’ as a basis for increased outcomes in the classroom has dominated federal reform for 20 years.
During the Gillard and Rudd years, postgraduate teaching degrees were lengthened and new HSC requirements for Education degrees such as minimum results in English were introduced. Former PM Malcolm Turnbull continued the trend by introducing the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education (LANTITE) in 2016 after education ministers approved the plan in 2011, which every teacher education student has to pass to gain accreditation. There was a clear link between improving the ‘standards’ of teachers and improving the results of students. Even the NSW Teacher Federation bought into these shifts to some extent arguing in reviews that “there is a clear downward trend in the academic attainment of students entering initial teacher education,” or pointing to the fact that in some cases “less than 60 per cent of students complete their course after six years.”
While it is politically impossible to argue with higher standards for teachers in the abstract, the question is irrelevant if teachers cannot do their job. Not seeing any improvements in the shortage since the rise in standards, current Education Minister Jacon Clare has flagged the return of one year post graduate degrees to “fast track people into the profession.” There has been a complete flip from creating the ‘best’ teachers to filling spots in classrooms.
Dr Claire Golledge, the coordinator of HSIE Curriculum at the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at USyd, told me that while there was a tension between getting teachers to fill positions and making sure they were adequately prepared the current see-saw was “crappy policy.”
“You cannot have your cake and eat it too,” she continued, arguing governments can always tweak standards as a quick way to signal initiative. The cost is relatively low and adding or cutting content from syllabuses is simple.
The premise behind streamlining education degrees, while politically fashionable, further takes away from the intellectual elements of teaching. Current estimates show that the average teacher makes over 1,500 professional decisions a day. Beyond making active choices about how to shape a complex and fast paced curriculum to sometimes up to 30 students from every walk of life, teachers are required to be professionally empathetic. Every problem students have at home manifests itself at school. Teachers have to be experts handling students struggling with mental health issues, abuse, anti-social behaviour, poverty, or just having the normal range of emotions teenagers all have.
The narrative that you can just be thrown into a classroom earlier and learn on the job or through observation is appealing, but handling these issues requires a deep understanding of psychology and the social and environmental factors that influence behaviour. This is before you even get to the subjects themselves which teachers have to not only master but be able to communicate in a variety of ways depending on the class they get.
How do you teach Shakespeare to a class with fluent English speakers and with those who speak English as a second and third language?
How do you teach a colonial Australian history curriculum to Indigenous students or recent migrants?
These are not questions that can be answered on the job. No politician would ever advocate the shortening of law or medicine degrees, even if there was a major shortage. You would never insert an IV or walk into a courtroom without years of training. For those professions and others, knowledge is seen as a prerequisite for the job. It is frankly shocking that teaching is not seen as an equivalently rigorous profession, especially considering they spend longer with people in their most formative years than any other group of people.
When young people seek an interest in teaching the profession is not framed as an intellectual challenge or a rewarding intellectual discipline but rather quite the opposite. Over ten students I talked to across their degrees told me they were told at various points by parents, friends, and even their own teachers, “you are too smart to be a teacher…” or “you could do so much more.”
Teaching is the one of the most popular occupations students aspire to in primary school and younger years of high school in Australia, however by the time students reach later years, teaching drops below almost every other profession in terms of its desirability.
The government is aware of the problem. In one submission to a parliament enquiry on the teacher shortage, academics told members they had to “work with media organisations to establish understanding of the vital role of teachers in creating and maintaining a vibrant, democratic society.” Advertising campaigns have been funded for years that are supposed to raise the reputation of the profession. The emphasis is often on “making a difference,” with every lesson presented as an opportunity to change a child’s life for the better. The ability to bond with students is important to highlight and as Dr Golledge points out ads like these push back against the “teacher bashing” in the media.
However, the shame of these advertising campaigns is that they mirror the narrative that teaching is something you do because of the passion you have, despite the challenges in the profession, and despite pay and conditions. This is somewhat a necessity due to the current state of the profession, but governments have to stop being defensive and fight for teachers publicly, not just in Department advertising but in parliament and during elections.
Universities ironically like an emphasis on standards because it plays into the marketing tools they use to present degrees. The chair of the most recent teaching standards review was Vice Chancellor Mark Scott. The review aligned itself with streamlining teacher education by introducing so-called “core content” to all degrees. When Labor was talking up standards a decade ago, universities pushed their new master’s degrees advertising the longer degrees better prepared teachers for emerging challenges in modern schools. Now, the new four year Bachelor of Education has replaced the five year double degrees in order to, in the words of USyd Education spokesperson Eddie Woo, “get teachers into the classroom faster.”
The obsession with teacher quality at the federal level also stems from the government’s increasing lack of control over the sector. Funding, workloads, and the other systemic issues are within state jurisdiction but the government in Canberra cannot just pass the buck. Every academic and teacher I spoke to expects the fixation with quality and standards to continue.
At the state level, the Minns government has made some valiant progress since their election last year. The historic pay deal reached with the union in September raised starting salaries to almost $10,000 to $85,000 and top of the scale teachers now make $122,000 a year. The $400 million Education Future Fund will push public schools closer to full SRS funding and hundreds of new pre-schools are being constructed.
Even with some change coming, students studying education at USyd empathised how demoralising the emphasis on teaching quality was. One said, “we always hear about low entrance scores to get into teaching. We always hear about teacher under-performance.” There is no other major profession where students have to read headline after headline telling them they are inadequate before they even step into the role. “It makes placements so stressful,” one second-year Primary Education student told me. “No matter what marks you get, there is a deep sense you are not ready.”
Almost every student mentioned paid placements repeatedly as the best thing the government could do to make teaching more attractive and sustainable. Over 80% of Education and Social Work students report adverse mental health pressure from the financial pressure associated with weeks of unpaid work. Examining placement poverty at the university level quickly displaces myths that standards are the issue. Teacher education students are not completing their degrees at lower rates because they are not ready for the job, or because the entrance marks are too low — people leave early because they have no other options.
“I know maybe two or three — maybe more — friends who have changed degrees or dropped out early before or during a large prac,” a third-year student told me.
Paying for placements and further incentives like the government footing the HECS bill for teacher education seem likely in the coming years. Victoria introduced a $229 million package last year which paid for the cost of teacher education degrees. One employee at the Department of Education signalled that this was already causing some NSW students to move, arguing the NSW government would likely have to follow suit to prevent more bleeding.
At the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, over 80% of parents said they had newfound respect for teachers after attempting to make up for the shortfalls during online learning. 67% think the job of a public school teacher was harder than their job. As a society we need to leverage our momentum to shift the narratives that blame some of the hardest working public servants for our own failures. More material reform can only happen if we truly believe the work they do is worth the billions required to fully fund school and fix the shortage.
When someone next tells you they are considering becoming a teacher, don’t question if they are suited for a more proper job – but also don’t smile as if they are taking on a burden you would rather ignore.
On the policy front, one student asked me at the end of our conversation if by the time they graduated in three years it would get any better. I did not know how to respond with any form of optimism. Even governments with good intentions and a wide mandate will take years to structurally reform the system. Constructive narratives that elevate the reputation of teachers while not placing the burden of education solely on them will allow society to shift away from marginal discussions based on standards and refocus on creating an environment where they can reach their civic and intellectual potential.
