Rachel Wilson

Childcare: When profit is the motivator, we should be worried

Early Childhood, Early childhood education and care, , , , ,

The Australian early childcare sector is experiencing a relentless surge in media attention. It has exposed significant concerns about children’s safety and the quality of early childhood education (ECE) across Australia. Coverage includes multiple and widespread abuse incidents, inappropriate discipline, unsafe sleep practices, serious mistreatment, and seemingly ineffectual regulation.

Evidence from the Early Learning Work Matters project points to systemic issues sitting beneath the diverse array of significant concerns across the Australian ECE sector. In ECE, where educator-child interactions are known to be the most significant contributor to individual child outcomes and service quality, educators’ experiences of work and children’s experiences of ECE are inextricably interwoven.

Current concerns around the diminishing quality of educator training programs, increasing casualisation of workforce, along with high turnover rates, attrition, and burnout – are all related to the current concerns around child safety. And yet quality education and care is about so much more than ‘just’ child safety – child safety should be a given.

Early Learning Work Matters

Our latest publication from the Early Learning Work Matters project focuses on educator workload. We surveyed 570 Australian ECE educators. They reported widespread concerns including heavy workloads, particularly non-contact work, regular unpaid hours, and limited and inconsistent access to entitled breaks. Critically, over 70% of educators reported feeling concerned that children are not receiving enough of their time. They also reported that educator workloads in their service are so heavy that they are reducing quality for children. Overall, educators report the nature of their workload and working conditions are reducing their capacity to engage in quality interactions, and to provide a quality program overall.

In the current climate, conditions for both educators and children at large are suboptimal. Genuine and meaningful reform requires thoughtful consideration of the system dynamics that have evolved allowing the current concerning conditions and associated risks to develop.

Systems Theory is an interdisciplinary framework that examines how different parts of a system interact and align to produce outcomes—often in complex, dynamic, and sometimes unintended ways. Rooted in the work of thinkers like Ludwig von Bertalanffy and refined through fields such as ecology, and organisational studies, Systems Theory encourages us to look beyond individual components to understand the interdependencies, feedback loops, and structural conditions that shape behaviours and outcomes.

We need a whole-of-system approach

The diverse concerns evident across ECE in Australia do not need a diverse array of isolated inquiries and solutions. What we need is a whole-of-system approach. That’s an approach where all concerns, such as risks to child safety, heavy workloads for educators and concerns around diminishing quality of educator training, are not separate but treated as facets of the same complex situation.

A key insight from Systems Theory is that elements within a system—people, organisations, regulations, funding flows—respond to the incentives and motivators embedded in the system design. These incentives can be explicit (such as financial rewards or compliance requirements) or implicit (such as reputational pressures). Critically, systems tend to ‘produce what they are designed to produce’. That doesn’t mean they necessarily produce their stated goals, or societal good more broadly. Rather, systems produce what the system design incentivises and promotes.

What’s the big picture?

To understand the ‘big picture’, we first need to ask: what does the current system incentivise and promote? And then critically, how can we shift this, such that quality education and care for young children remains front and centre?

In Australia, where 70% of long day care services are operated by for-profit providers, and 32% are large providers, Systems Theory offers a powerful lens for analysis. When profits and market competition are primary motivators, incentives may prioritise cost efficiency, occupancy rates, and shareholder returns over pedagogical quality or child wellbeing. This can shape service delivery in subtle but systemic ways, for example: limiting educator-child ratios, reducing opportunities for professional development, or skewing investments away from relational, high-quality interactions, toward standardised, scalable models.

As part of an earlier phase of the Early Learning Work Matters project, degree-qualified early childhood teachers were interviewed about their experiences and perspectives of work. Several participants commented on their experience of competing demands, with one sharing: “You’re constantly trying to keep all these different parties happy, and that’s before you even get to the kids, which really should be the number one, but aren’t”.

Not just the experiences of a few

At times like this, it is important to note that these are not just the experiences of a few, these are not isolated concerns. These are representative of system issues underpinning the sector at large.

A systems-informed analysis does not simply criticise individual providers but interrogates how regulatory settings, funding mechanisms, workforce conditions, and market structures interact to produce current patterns of care. It asks: what and who does the system currently reward, and what or who is neglected? Further, what are the system goals and how are other system elements aligned with them? Crucially for ECE, a systems-informed analysis should ask: what kind of system design do we need to ensure that the best interests of young children—rather than commercial returns—are the driving force of early education provision?

Understanding and applying Systems Theory in this way helps shift the focus. It shifts the focus from symptoms to structures, and from individual cases with isolated interventions to meaningful systemic change.

No more reactive policy

How can we do this? We need more reporting transparency. And we need more largescale data and more quality research. That’s to better understand the scope and complexity of issues we are now facing. We must give voice to our educators — they are the ones on the ground working in this system day-by-day. We need to understand the complexity of the issues our educators are experiencing. And finally, we need to take a big picture perspective to understand our ECE system in its entirety.

No more reactive policy. No more band aid solutions, and knee-jerk reactions. A coordinated and cohesive approach to system design is needed. We need that to safeguard children’s wellbeing at a minimum — and beyond that, to support every young child to flourish and thrive.

Erin is a Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at the University of Sydney, and an early childhood teacher, with a Bachelor of Education and over 15 years working with children from birth to five years of age.

Rachel is Professor of Social Impact at the University of Technology Sydney  and an internationally recognised expert in education. She has a long track record of diverse social science research looking at education, work, health, management, leadership, and broader human development.

migration

Is Australia now ready for migrant teachers?

IELTS, migrant teachers, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“We help you get started on your teaching journey in Australia”. — AITSL

Amid the 2025 federal election furor, migration became a central issue. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton  proposed cutting permanent migration and capping international students. He blamed recent arrivals for pressure on housing, healthcare, and education. “Labor’s brought in a million people over two years”, he said, citing record migration and housing strain.

While Dutton stopped short of claiming migrants are “lowering standards”, his rhetoric mirrors a global trend in right-wing populism. In March 2025, the US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the US Department of Education. He fulfilled a campaign promise to return school control to states—raising concerns over equity and federal support.

Both leaders framed migration as a threat to national capacity and cultural values. This revealed a deeper ideological project: the re-bordering of education under the guise of standards and control. Migration becomes a strategic focal point—mobilised to rally electoral support by casting it as both a cultural disruption and a structural burden to national institutions.

A more polished message

In contrast, the AITSL presents a more polished message: “Australia is popular for many things… a safe country with a friendly and relaxed culture… we can help you get started on your teaching journey”. Yet the AITSL portal also codifies a logic of superiority—positioning Australia’s education system as globally exceptional, its teachers as stewards of excellence, and its structures as the source of “evidence-based tools”.

This nation-branding rhetoric appears inclusive on the surface. But as our discourse analysis reveals, it constructs a one-way narrative of giving. Migrant teachers are positioned as beginners—“starting out”—even when they arrive with decades of experience. Their role is not to enrich the system, but to assimilate into it. As Mahati, a respected English teacher from India in Nashid’s doctoral study, reflected: “I had been teaching English for over twenty years across continents—India and Uganda—before I came to Australia. But here, I had to redo everything. It felt like I was invisible”.

The real costs are tangible. Laura, a cherished English teacher from the Philippines and participant in Nashid’s doctoral study, told us: “I took the IELTS test four times plus a review over two years. It cost me nearly four months’ salary in pesos. I had everything else ready—but the language requirement kept holding me back”.

Far from isolated

This issue is far from isolated. Migrant teachers frequently encounter inconsistent and retroactively enforced policy barriers. This occurs even amid a critical shortage of teachers and skilled migrants in education. While not representative of all, the stories of Amarjit, Anya, Reza, and others—such as Archana, Jigna, Joy, Hossein and his wife, Mahesh, Nishni, Samia, and Shurma—reflect recurring themes emerging from our shared work and Nashid’s doctoral research with immigrant teachers. Reza, a science teacher from Bangladesh, completed his Initial Teacher Education in Victoria. When he enrolled, the Victorian Institute of Teaching (VIT) required a lower IELTS threshold. But by the time he graduated, the benchmark had shifted significantly. “Academic IELTS: at least 7.0 in Reading and Writing and 8.0 in Speaking and Listening, on one TRF (Test Report From), taken within 24 months”.

An overall IELTS score of 7.5 or 8.0 can still be rejected if one skill—such as Writing at 6.5—falls below the required threshold. As scholars argue, this rigid, decontextualised format reflects a neoliberal and neocolonial gatekeeping logic. It marginalises qualified multilingual teachers through standardised measures detached from real-world communication.

Reza explained: “I kept failing. One time I got 8 in listening but 6.5 in writing. The next time it was the reverse. After two years, I gave up and returned home”.

One teacher’s journey

He continued teaching—at an international college in Bangladesh—while repeatedly sitting for the IELTS test. Over time, each attempt brought him close, but never across the threshold required by Australian standards. After two years of emotional and financial strain, his family suggested he apply through New Zealand. There a score of 7.0 across all bands was still accepted. He met the criteria, registered with the Teachers Registration Board of South Australia (TRBSA), and used this to apply for skilled migration with family sponsorship—gaining an additional 10 points. From there, he transferred his registration to the Victorian Institute of Teaching (VIT) and finally settled in Melbourne.

This narrative is part of a broader trend of policy drift: where teacher migration frameworks become increasingly exclusionary, often without recognising their global contributions, lived experiences, and situated knowledge of those navigating them. By contrast, NESA now offers more flexible pathways, including English testing exemptions for internationally trained teachers with relevant experience or English-medium qualifications.

State-level discrepancies

These state-level discrepancies expose a fragmented and inequitable accreditation landscape. Since 2022, our research and public engagement have informed national discussions and policy change. An article by the Australian Associated Press (AAP)—syndicated across 100+ media outlets— amplified the undervaluation of skilled migrant teachers, contributing to recent NESA reforms on English language proficiency test exemptions for internationally trained teachers.

Quang, a respected English teacher from Vietnam with four English-medium postgraduate degrees (two from Vietnam, two from Australia, including ITE/Secondary), shared a similar experience. “I passed everything—teaching practicum, assessments, I even got distinctions. But I still had to sit for another English test to register in NSW”.

This was only because two of his Australian degrees did not meet the four-year study requirement.

He started teaching as a CRT later. The principal introduced him to others by saying, “This is our new Vietnamese English teacher”. He wasn’t offended, even when told that others had laughed upon hearing that—but he understood what it signified.

“It shows what people expect: that someone like me isn’t usually seen as an English teacher”.

It’s not just language being measures

What’s being measured isn’t just language. It’s legitimacy. It’s the right to belong.

The AITSL migration guidelines suggest legitimacy flows from only a handful of countries—Australia, Canada, Ireland, NZ, the UK, and the USA—excluding many English-medium post-colonial nations like the Philippines, India, Kenya, Ghana, and Singapore.

Similarly, the “Teaching in Australia” guide constructs the ideal teacher through phrases like “Australian teachers must…”, framing competence as nationalised and native. Even appeals to “multicultural classrooms” fail to acknowledge migrant teachers as co-creators of this richness. Their linguistic and cultural knowledge is seen less as a resource, more as a hurdle.

This mirrors what Sender and colleagues call  epistemic monolingualism: a worldview that centres standardised English and Western pedagogies as the only legitimate forms of knowledge. Yet many migrant teachers resist this framing through what we call Hybrid Professional Becoming. They don’t simply assimilate—they reimagine themselves cosmopolitan teachers of English. They engage in translanguaging, build solidarity, and develop culturally responsive pedagogies.

Natalie, a Bangladeshi teacher, shared:
“Sometimes I switch to English, Chittagonian, Jessore dialect, or what’s called standard or non-standard Bangla—not for fluency, but to build trust. It’s about connection and recognising different ways of knowing”.

Quang, reflecting on his students, said:
“They’d ask me, ‘Is my accent okay?’ I’d say, ‘Your English is beautiful. Don’t worry about it’.”

These teachers are already transforming classrooms

Such affective, relational practices disrupt top-down discourses of “support.” These teachers aren’t waiting to belong—they’re already transforming classrooms.

Yet policy rarely reflects this reality. Instead, it reinforces rigid standards and racialised assumptions. As Anthony Welch notes, fast-tracking applicants from English-dominant nations won’t solve the workforce crisis. Australia must confront the systemic devaluation of those already here.

The AARE Election Statement (2025) calls for equity, multilingualism, and recognition of teaching as a global profession. But first, we must name the problem: Australia’s teaching workforce remains bordered by accent, passport, and memory.

So let’s stop asking whether migrant teachers are “ready for Australia”.

Let’s ask whether Australia is ready to learn from the teachers already here— fluent not only in English, but in empathy, hybridity, and the courage to reimagine education.

Biographies from left to right

Nashid Nigar teaches at the University of Melbourne and brings 20+ years of experience in language and literacy education, academic writing, and teacher development. Her PhD at Monash Education, awarded the prestigious 2024 Mollie Holman Medal, introduced the framework of Hybrid Professional Becoming—advancing research in multilingual curriculum, teacher identity, and curriculum justice. Her work, grounded in epistemic diversity and equity, informs national policy and supports culturally and linguistically diverse educators globally.

Lilly Yazdanpanah is a lecturer in the School of Education at La Trobe University. Her research focuses on equity and social justice in education, with a particular emphasis on teacher and student identity within English as an Additional Language (EAL) contexts. She has extensive experience teaching in undergraduate and postgraduate teacher education programs across the Middle East, Europe, Central America, and Australia. Before joining La Trobe, she held teaching and research positions at the Faculty of Education, Monash University, specialising in TESOL and General Education.  

Sender Dovchin is a Senior Principal Research Fellow and ARC Fellow at Curtin University. Her research focuses on linguistic racism and the empowerment of CALD youth in Australia. She holds a PhD and MA from UTS and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics. Recognised as a leading scholar in Language & Linguistics, she has published six books and numerous papers in top international journals.

Rachel Wilson is a leading scholar in education and social impact at the University of Technology Sydney. With a background in psychology, teaching, and research methodology, her work spans education systems, curriculum reform, equity, and leadership. Rachel has extensive experience in research training, educational evaluation, and policy advising, and is committed to advancing quality and justice in education.

Alex Kostogriz is the professor in Languages and TESOL Education within the Faculty of Education at Monash University. He currently serves as the Associate Dean (International) within the faculty. Alex’s ongoing research endeavours are centred around the professional practice and ethics of language teachers, as well as the realms of teacher education and the early experiences of early career educators.





teaching

The one report on teaching you need to read

teacher recruitment, teacher retention, teacher workforce, teacher workload, Teachers' work, , ,

There’s a lot going on in the world, so you’d be forgiven for missing a big story that was announced nearly two weeks ago. It’s certainly bigger than Rupert Murdoch’s sixth fiancée , and Taylor Swift’s hotel choices, but naturally got a lot less coverage.

Although confronting troubles around the world desperately deserve immediate attention, this story focuses on a neglected, less visible issue, with calls for urgent action to address an “ongoing and worsening crisis”. It’s about a long game, ways of transforming and lifting our future outlook, it’s about ensuring we do our best to avoid conflict, mitigate natural disasters and work towards peace, democracy and shared prosperity

It’s about teachers

.. and it couldn’t be more important to the future of humanity and the planet.

The “high level panel on the teaching profession” report was commissioned by UN secretary, Antonio Gutierrez. Led by two former heads of state, and sponsored by three international organisations, the UN, the International Labour Organisation, and UNESCO, the initial announcement of the panel in July 2023 got much more media coverage than the recent release of the report. One has to wonder why.

The report puts forward “ an urgent call to action” needed to “ shape a stronger, more sustainable future” and “ our best hope for building a more sustainable and socially just world”. It outlines critical support, governance, investment , and a “new social contract” urgently needed to shift mindsets, leadership and discourse. 

The report highlights the critical and dangerous problem of current, international teacher shortages (estimated to be 44 million teachers worldwide), linking this to the low status and working conditions of teachers, insufficient capacity for teacher leadership, autonomy, and innovation and lack of professional development opportunities. Shortages are highly evident in wealthy countries, like Australia, but importing solutions has already been shown to produce “domino effects”. Add to this the challenges of stagnant and declining performance in many countries, the impact of covid, the rapidly changing technological environment and growing conflict and climate crises, it’s a nasty cocktail.

To address such wicked and interacting problems, the report argues, we need to reshape societal perceptions of teachers and transform their roles to create better education for all.

The report provides 59 recommendations, I have grouped and summarised these below. These are easily said and read, but challenging to implement. The value of the recommendations lies in their clear articulation of values and principles, which recognise the central and pivotal role of teachers in strengthening society.  

Challenging to implement

The recommendations essentially provide a checklist against which countries can evaluate their social, political and policy attention to teachers. I will consider this in relation to Australian teachers later. 

———————————————————————————————————————-

1. Enable transformation of the teaching profession:

  • Teachers need an enabling environment with holistic social support.
  • Governments should implement rights for education and decent work.
  • Education goals should promote varied learning pathways.
  • Adopt comprehensive national teacher policies through dialogue.
  • Establish mechanisms to tackle shortages and ensure equitable deployment.
  • Implement Teacher Management and Information Systems.

2. Invest in teachers:

  • Ensure at least 6% of GDP and 20% of government expenditure for education.
  • Long-term investment in teachers is essential for system sustainability.
  • Monitor and evaluate education spending and ensure financial autonomy.

3. Promote equity, diversity and inclusion:

  • Develop policies to promote equity and diversity in teaching.
  • Provide incentives for teachers in rural and hardship settings.
  • Develop policies to support teachers in crisis-affected areas.
  • Facilitate the integration of refugee teachers into host communities.

4. Educate for Sustainable Development:

  • Integrate sustainability education into curricula.
  • Train teachers for global citizenship and human rights.
  • Develop adaptation strategies for climate resilience.

5. Foster Decent Work in Teaching:

  • Ensure secure employment and working conditions for teachers.
  • Ensure fair salaries and gender pay equity.
  • Provide supportive working conditions for teachers’ well-being.
  • Promote mental health and well-being policies for teachers.
  • Support education support personnel to reduce non-teaching tasks.

5. Nurture leadership in Teaching and Human-Centred Education Technology:

  • Foster collaborative school leadership for recruitment and retention.
  • Encourage distributed leadership within schools.
  • Promote policies for diversity in leadership.
  • Pedagogically integrate technology for active learning.
  • Ensure autonomy and privacy in technology use.
  • Train teachers and learners to use technology effectively.

———————————————————————————————————

What this means for Australian education

There’s a lot in this relatively thin 44 page report, so I’ll just touch on a few points regarding the first recommendation. In full, it reads like this:

“1. Teachers are the central element in the transformation of education systems. Yet teachers do not work in a vacuum. To be effective, they require an enabling environment and holistic social support for their work. Governments should develop economic and social policies that support teaching and learning through adequate and equitable funding for education and lifelong learning. Such policies should ensure that parents and families have the time and capacity to support learners, that learners have access to adequate nutrition and healthcare services, that learning spaces are safe and inclusive, that learning institutions have adequate infrastructure and connectivity, and that the teaching profession enjoys high status and support.” 

I’ve highlighted a few weak points for Australia, the first relates to holistic social support for teachers. Australia could clearly do better here. In particular media discourse and analysis of educational problems, often point the finger at teachers as responsible for our current educational malaise. Educational accountability is often placed solely at the feet of teachers, yet, as the panel points out:

“Just as teachers need to be accountable to students, education systems and communities overall, teachers themselves require accountability from the system. This involves providing decent working conditions, including sustainable workloads, work-life balance, appropriate class sizes, adequate infrastructure and resources, professional autonomy and agency, and safe and healthy working environments. “ ( p.27)

Given the documented issues related to Australian teachers’ ’decent working conditions’, both accountability frameworks and teachers’ sense of holistic social support are important considerations if we are to progress – and meet the international benchmark laid out in this recommendation. 

What we need to progress

So too, the arrangements needed to meet “adequate and equitable funding”. On this front, Australia has an extremely poor record and is unable to meet requirements for “the efficiency and efficacy of education funding and spending on teachers needs to be monitored and evaluated” and  “ budget tracking and evaluation mechanisms and analysis should ensure transparency and accountability for spending. “  detailed later in the report. Successive reviews, including by the national audit office, have made this clear.

In the first recommendation, and throughout the report ,there is a strong focus on lifelong learning, both for teachers and students. Lifelong learning is one of Australia’s national goals, as laid out in the Mparntwe declaration, however it is rarely rates a mention in high level policy (e.g. the National School Reform Agreement, where it is never mentioned), indicators of it are underdeveloped, and not evident in government national  reporting.  Developing lifelong approaches to learning, firstly among teachers, their students, and system architecture is currently an area of national policy with unrealised potential. 

There’s a lot more to be unpacked in relation to this initial recommendation. It raises many questions about how we support families so they can support learners, and also how we might integrate nutrition, healthcare and other services into education in schools. Many other countries do this highly effectively and it would be worth reviewing our current arrangements.  

Nutrition and health care. What else?

In order to tackle the many challenges the report later specifically suggests:

“Governments should establish national commissions or other mechanisms, which should include relevant financial authorities, representatives of teachers’ organizations and other relevant stakeholders, to assess and tackle shortages of adequately trained teachers. Such commissions or mechanisms should address labour market analyses, recruitment, teacher migration, attrition and retention, compensation, status and rights, workload and wellbeing, equity (including the ratio of qualified teachers to students), equality and infrastructure.” p.4

To me, this is the most valuable recommendation, echoing calls around Australia for the last 10 years. We need an independent body to review and advise on education and strengthen system accountability. If we had one we might not find ourselves with inequitable funding, poor working conditions and a teacher shortage crisis. It’s not too late to start and turn things around. There’s a new commission for higher education being developed now – can we expand on that vision?

Can we respond to the panel and Guterres’ call and join the “powerful global call to action”?

Rachel Wilson is Professor, Social Impact, University of Technology Sydney Business School . She has expertise in educational assessment, research methods and programme evaluation, with broad interests across educational evidence, policy and practice. She is interested in system-level reform and has been involved in designing, implementing and researching many university and school education reforms. Rachel is on Twitter@RachelWilson100.

One day to go: the great education reckoning as parties eye the election prize

teacher recruitment, teacher retention, teacher shortage, teacher workload, teaching, teaching workforce, , , , , , ,

The ‘education election’?

Before heading to the polling booths this Saturday, we take stock of how the major political parties, and the newly formed Public Education Party, stack up over their policies and priorities for education. 

It has been a difficult time for public education over the last decade. Research has documented that the teaching profession is in crisis. Stress, high work demands, long working hours, excessive administrative burdens and under-valuing of teachers is contributing to a worsening teacher shortage. School leaders are experiencing poor wellbeing, compounded by reports of threats of violence. 

A decade-long legislated ‘cap’ on teacher salaries has led to wage suppression and difficulties in attracting and retaining teachers in the profession. Meanwhile teachers worked very hard during the COVID-19 pandemic to continue students’ learning, despite reports of experiencing declines in morale and efficacy. Demands on teachers are set to continue with a new curriculum being rolled out next year. And all this in a context where politicians decry ‘falling education standards’ of students, while inequity in the state’s education system continues to grow. 

What is promised for education 

NSW Liberals and National Party Coalition

A key plank of the Coalition’s policy on education is the announcement of a $15.9 billion ‘early years commitment’ that will fund universal pre-kindergarten education, increase affordable childcare places, and improve attraction and retention in the early childhood workforce. This is part of the government’s proposed ‘future fund’ for children to assist with education and home deposits.

The Coalition will also continue an intensive learning support program introduced during the pandemic, providing a $253 million funding boost for this scheme. School infrastructure is also a priority, with a $8.6 billion plan to build and upgrade schools and preschools. 

The Coalition’s Rewarding Excellence in teaching policy promises a $100 million commitment to pay ‘excellent’ teachers salaries of up to $152,000. Permanency in the teaching workforce is also a focus, with a promise to offer 11,000 teachers and 4,000 support staff with permanent roles in 2023. Finally, teachers’ administrative and workload burdens will be targeted through the hiring of 200 new administrative roles, under an initiative introduced earlier this year.

NSW Labor

Labor’s teacher workforce policy aims to “end the war on teachers and attract and keep them”. Noting key recommendations in the independent Gallop Inquiry report, dubbed the ‘blueprint’ for change, Labor’s policy recognises the excessive workloads and administrative burdens on teachers, as well as a need to make teacher salaries more competitive and address the teacher shortage problem (relatedly, there is a promise to scrap the public sector wage cap, but whether this will mean a pay rise for teachers across-the-board is unclear). 

Labor has also articulated a plan to carry out an audit of teachers’ administrative tasks in an effort to reduce teachers’ workload and cut 5 hours worth of administrative tasks per week for teachers. Greater job security is also on the cards, with a promise to convert 10,000 temporary teachers to permanent positions. 

To address historic underfunding and under-resourcing of public schools and ensure the schooling resource standard benchmark for education spending is met (a key recommendation of the Gonski reforms), Labor is promising a $400 million education ‘future fund’. This will be spent on hiring more teachers and school counsellors, as well as making permanent a tutoring program to provide intensive support for students who need it most in an effort to bolster support for literacy and numeracy. 

Other key policies include banning the use of mobile phones in high schools to reduce distractions, allowing public schools to offer the International Baccalaureate program, investment to fund the building and expansion of preschools, as well as building new schools in Western and South-Western Sydney. 

The Greens

The Greens plan to scrap the public sector wages cap and deliver a 15% pay increase to public school teachers (plus inflation) as well as increase release time from face-to-face teaching, drawing on the Gallop Report recommendations. 

Some other policies include increasing the number of school councillors in public schools, developing a workforce plan to better attract teachers into the profession over the next decade, and funding schools to 100% of the schooling resource standard. 

The Public Education Party 

It says something about the state of public schooling in NSW that a group of seventeen teachers and principals are standing for the newly formed Public Education Party. These candidates commit to “advocating for quality public education, supporting all students, championing all public educational institutions and communities, advocating for social justice and equity, and fighting for a fairer, more cohesive, and productive society”. 

The Public Education Party’s policies include fully funding the schooling resource standard for all schools, and commitment to the national, but much neglected goal, of developing “active and informed citizens”.

The scale of the challenges 

We commend many of these proposals as promising developments to deal with teachers’ workload and administrative demands, and high rates of temporary teachers in the profession. Indeed, workload and job insecurity are issues we have researched and reported on for many years. 

But promises to shave off a few hours of teachers’ administrative workload per week, we argue, are not sufficient and also open up risk of essential work of teachers being ‘carved off’ to achieve this numeric target. 

And, adding to workload pressures, no new funding is being injected into schools to support teachers in planning for the new curriculum – at present, funding to plan for the new curriculum will come from schools’ existing budgets, including already underfunded public schools. 

Pay increases in the form of ‘rewarding excellent teachers’ also don’t address the across-the-board decline in teacher salaries – an issue the independent Gallop Inquiry recommended required urgent redress. Such policies are also based on economic arguments that assume teachers are motivated by financial rewards, a position that is not well-supported in research.  

Overall, from our perspective there is a need to truly understand and appreciate the complex nature of teachers’ work, and to support this work through appropriate work and employment conditions. This goal will remain important, no matter the election outcome. 

Mihajla Gavin is a lecturer in the Business School at the University of Technology Sydney, and has worked as a senior officer in the public sector in Australia across various workplace relations advisory, policy and project roles. Mihajla’s research is concerned with analysing the response of teacher unions to neoliberal education reform that has affected teachers’ conditions of work. Mihajla is on Twitter @Mihajla_Gavin. Meghan Stacey is a former high school English and drama teacher and current lecturer in the School of Education at UNSW Sydney. Meghan’s primary research interests sit at the intersection of sociological theory, policy sociology and the experiences of those subject to systems of education. Meghan’s PhD was conferred in April 2018. Meghan is on Twitter @meghanrstacey Susan McGrath-Champ is Professor in the Work and Organisational Studies Discipline at the University of Sydney Business School, Australia. Her research includes the geographical aspects of the world of work, employment relations and international human resource management. Recent studies include those of school teachers’ work and working conditions. Rachel Wilson is Professor, Social Impact, University of Technology Sydney Business School . She has expertise in educational assessment, research methods and programme evaluation, with broad interests across educational evidence, policy and practice. She is interested in system-level reform and has been involved in designing, implementing and researching many university and school education reforms. Rachel is on Twitter @RachelWilson100.

Header image from the NSW Teachers Federation website

Why do teachers have bigger workloads now?

teacher workload, ,

It’s nothing new to say that teachers are experiencing increased workload. But where does this increased workload come from?

Some media reports suggest it is due to student behaviour problems or demanding parents, but what do teachers themselves report?

In a recent article published in the Journal of Educational Change (which is free to access in Australia!), we explore the perceptions of the teaching profession about change to their workload over a five-year period and how they attributed the cause of this change.

Theories of change and education policy

According to sociologist and political scientist Hartmut Rosa, we currently live in an era of ‘social acceleration’, where there is often a perception that even the “rates of change themselves are changing”.

 In our article, we combined this theory about how time is experienced with theories of governance in education, including ideas like ‘fast policy’ and ‘policy layering’.

‘Fast policy’ is the concept that, in a time of heightened global flows, policy ideas now move much more quickly, with, as Lewis and Hogan put it, a “need for highly visible political action … [overriding] the need for a comprehensive approach to reform”. Lewis and Hogan thereby identify a “new policy temporality … in which schooling reform is regularly demanded and ‘quick-fix’ solutions are putatively needed”. Yet as these changes are introduced, they can have unintended effects on workload. This is sometimes because they are ‘layered’ on top of existing policy, and previous changes, creating a cumulative effect.

Our study

To explore experiences of change from the perspective of teachers, including where such change was attributed to shifts in policy, we used data from a workload survey conducted with 18, 234 teachers via the NSW Teachers Federation in 2018 (you can read the full report from the survey here).

 Our research questions for the article were:

1. How do teachers reflect on changes to their work over the period 2013–2017?

2. How do teachers reflect on the role of policy in relation to these changes?

Change to workload

Teachers were asked to report changes to their work over the five-year period from 2013 to 2017. Respondents reported increases in the following aspects of their work: complexity (95% reporting an increase); range of activities (85%); the collection, analysis and reporting of data (96%); and administrative tasks (97%).

In addition, four in ten felt support from the Department had decreased during the five-year period, and half felt it had not changed (although demands had grown).

Teachers described the perceived increase in demands particularly in terms of “paperwork”: “there is way too much paperwork”; “the amount of paperwork required is ridiculous”. “Admin” was often linked by respondents to accountability mechanisms, with “the greatest change” being “the amount and importance of … box-ticking style evaluation and oversight processes”.

Attribution of change to workload

Teachers attributed increases in workload to accountability, administrative and data work. Respondents described a view that policymakers “should stop changing things all the time. See how a change impacts before changing again”, and that authorities should “choose one or two new initiatives, rather than several, for schools to implement at any time and allow teachers to become proficient in these before bringing in further initiatives”.

A very large majority of teachers also reported that teaching and learning was hindered by such demands, including having to provide evidence of compliance with policy requirements (86%), and new administrative demands introduced by their employer (91%). 

Just under one in six classroom teachers agreed that “the Department of Education values my work”. Nearly half (44 %) disagreed, and 40% selecting “neutral”.

Overall

The results of our research suggest a perception of increase in work demands alongside reduced support. Teacher respondents attributed these workload increases to state and federal policy and associated institutions. We argue that such reforms are understood by respondents as related to an increased rate of change within an “accelerated” and “accelerating” society, manifesting through multiple, sometimes constant and sometimes contradictory or conflicting policy “layers”.

Whether such increases as respondents report are ‘real’ or not, is not something we can claim. The data we have presented is, of course, self-reported. But either way, there is evidently a sense of discord and mistrust amongst the teaching profession. This disquiet will need to be addressed if reports of debilitating teacher shortages are going to be effectively reversed. To this end, we note, and applaud, recent efforts of policymakers to reduce teachers’ administrative burden with, for example, a national teacher workforce action plan and a plan to protect teachers’ ‘quality time’. However, these plans have themselves given rise to calls for an increased focus on retention, and not just attraction; and to protect teachers’ ‘core work’, such as lesson planning, from being outsourced under the guise of ‘admin’ reduction. As the school year resumes for 2023 and returning teachers confront their jobs anew, finding ways to effectively support the work that teachers want to do is likely to need ongoing attention.

Meghan Stacey is a lecturer in the School of Education at UNSW Sydney. Meghan’s primary research interests sit at the intersection of sociological theory, policy sociology and the experiences of those subject to systems of education and is a former high school English and drama teacher. Meghan’s PhD was conferred in April 2018. Meghan is on Twitter @meghanrstacey. Susan McGrath-Champ is Professor in the Work and Organisational Studies Discipline at the University of Sydney Business School, Australia. Her research includes the geographical aspects of the world of work, employment relations and international human resource management. Recent studies include those of school teachers’ work and working conditions. Rachel Wilson is Professor, Social Impact, University of Technology Sydney Business School . She has expertise in educational assessment, research methods and programme evaluation, with broad interests across educational evidence, policy and practice. She is interested in system-level reform and has been involved in designing, implementing and researching many university and school education reforms. Rachel is on Twitter @RachelWilson100.

It’s a watershed report but it’s hidden behind headlines

National Measurement Framework for Schooling, National School Reform Agreement, National Teacher Workforce Data, , , ,

What the Productivity Commission’s National School Reform Agreement report really says. 

Monday’s ROGS report from the Productivity Commission is the fourth in a row making important insights on where Australian education has gone wrong. 

The data for the Report on Government Services (ROGS) made it clear that Australian school funding is iniquitous. While this fact could have been called out on any day in the nearly 11 years since the Gonski report was released, the data establishes it authoritatively. Previous low key reports by the National School Resourcing Board and National Audit Office  have highlighted the lack of transparency and accountability evident in funding arrangements. 

Earlier, the PCs interim report for the quinquennial productivity review in October last year put education issues front and centre of economic concerns, and provided a warning bell for their interim report on the National School Reform Agreement (NSRA).  Both clearly assert ‘Canberra, we have a[n education] problem’

These three identify the threat that arises from our current educational woes, and make it clear that there are system structural and transparency faults contributing to our difficulties.  But it is the PCs report on the National School Reform Agreement that provides a fuller analysis of our education system. Importantly identifying deeply entrenched system level faults.  

Headlines on the NSRA report squealed “Call for focus on teaching as academic results slide despite $300b school funding deal“ and  “Still lessons to be learned to improve student outcomes“ suggesting the problems resided with teachers, in classrooms . Social media comments were along the lines of  “please save us from another report telling us how bad Australian education is”, and from teachers… “the start of school year whinge about teachers” 

However, the 350 page NSRA report is not just another highlighting the long litany of stagnation and declines in Australian education. I would encourage all education researchers to read it, but for fans of Blinklist, I provide a synopsis and explain why.

Teachers are not to blame. Calling out Government and bureaucratic failures

Let’s start at the beginning. The report was designed to examine and evaluate “the effectiveness and appropriateness” in the national school reforms; and “the appropriateness of the National Measurement Framework for Schooling in Australia”. 

On the reforms a report card is provided in the main report, see below, but not the summary report (perhaps this is why the headlines went awry?).

This report card rather optimistically claims that four out of seven initiatives have been achieved. Reflecting on this, I can’t help but wonder what a 3/7 scorecard for a school principal would lead to? 

In this case, despite investing $319 billion, key initiatives remain virtually untouched. 

The tick against the national teacher workforce strategy seems overly positive, particularly as the National Teacher Workforce Data set is currently incomplete, with only approximately 10% of Australia’s teachers included. 

So too the report of “partial” outcome assessment in improving national data quality. As the report goes on to show, the NMFSA data is far from ideal, not aligned to national education goals, and poorly reported on.

If you’re not a fan of educational data please don’t turn away now. You may have been put off by the data we currently have, and the focus on how schools will work with it, but data is fundamental to system monitoring – and here is where the core of the problem lies. 

The report goes on to conclude: 

  • “The Agreement’s outcomes and targets were incomplete
  • Reform activity has at times lacked focus and flexibility
  • Reporting and transparency arrangements have not had bite “

There may be some bureaucratic euphemism here. On my reading of the situation there were no specific targets, many reforms were not achieved, and reporting and transparency was virtually non-existent. 

Still, there are some lessons to be learnt for future reform agreements, namely

  1. “Parties should focus the next school reform agreement on directly lifting student outcomes … 
  2. … and adapt accountability mechanisms to reflect a greater role for state-specific actions “

In other words, if there is to be any hope of improving the situation, we need to focus on clear goals for students – and make the system/s accountable. 

I have to agree. After all, teachers have been facing accountability pressures for some time and often face the brunt of blame for poor educational outcomes. From my own research perspective, listening to teachers, I can see much current frustration in Australian education  boiling down to the old expression “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” . 

Frequent calls for teachers to lift teaching quality, be more evidence based in their practice, must be matched by evidence based policy.  We need more data, transparent reporting and critical system analysis to identify the structural problem at the heart of our current woes. We need an education system designed for purpose that can pursue the educational goals we have agreed to. And we need upward as well as downward accountability in order to serve students, citizens and society. 

Nicole Mockler’s analysis of media suggests the dominant refrain is “we have a teacher problem” but much relies on system architecture, like the NMFSA, where we evidently have some challenges.Furthermore there is little evidence to support the assertion that teacher/teaching quality is a problem. Our system data is simply inadequate to support that assertion. We don’t have adequate data on who and where our teachers are in order to address teacher shortages, nevermind data telling us what they do and how effective they are. 

The report goes on to examine some of the dynamics between poor monitoring of educational equity, rising issues with student wellbeing and problems,work demands on teachers and teacher shortages. It makes for sobering reading. 

The National Measurement Framework – unfit for purpose? 

In its evaluation of the NMFSA the report concludes: 

“The Measurement Framework for Schooling in Australia (MFSA)’s Key Performance Measure (KPM) dataset has reporting gaps against the National School Reform Agreement (NSRA) performance reporting framework, particularly on outcomes for students from priority equity cohorts. “ 

In fact, as the submission from the Centre for Educational Measurement and Assessment makes clear, very little of the data is aligned to national educational goals. Furthermore, there is inadequate monitoring and reporting on the data available – resulting in poor transparency on how our system is performing, and where trends are heading. This is particularly the case with educational equity, which is declining, but is not effectively monitored by government reporting. The outcomes for some equity cohorts, like students with disability for example, are completely ignored in the National Report on Australian Schooling. 

The PC NSRA report agrees and concludes: 

“The NSRA has an accountability deficit. In addition to the MFSA not being wholly relevant and complete as a tool to measure progress against the Agreement sub outcomes, visibility of governments’ progress is diminished by the absence of standalone reporting.”

Recommendations: Focus on equity, increase system transparency, support teachers and student wellbeing

These seem like sensible recommendations. Equity, in tandem with excellence is, after all, our number one education goal. It seems logical we should focus on it, monitor and report on it. Only then can we hope to target money and resources accurately and efficiently to minimise inequity.

The key to building equity naturally requires a focus on students, not only what they learn but how they feel. Broadening educational goals, and data, to value and monitor student wellbeing is a no-brainer. 

And no progress can be made without supporting teachers. Addressing structural and system accountability problems, including poor data, inadequate monitoring for reasonable targeting of funding and resources, poor professional workforce management, will make teachers’ working lives in schools much easier and productive. 

This is a watershed realisation in a government report, an acknowledgement that it is the system, not teachers, that is failing. That is a good start. 

Rachel Wilson is associate professor at The Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. She has expertise in educational assessment, research methods and programme evaluation, with broad interests across educational evidence, policy and practice. She is interested in system-level reform and has been involved in designing, implementing and researching many university and school education reforms. Rachel is on Twitter @RachelWilson100

Top of the pops: AARE’s Hottest Ten 2022

21st century teaching, academic workforce, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thank you to all our contributors in 2022. We published over 100 blog posts this year from academics all over Australia, from research students to DECRA fellows, to deans and professors. Thank you all for being part of our community and many thanks to the AARE executive, especially newly-minted Professor Nicole Mockler.

Didn’t get to write this year? Want to contribute? Here are notes for contributors. Pitch to me at jenna@aare.edu.au.

The 2022 AARE EduResearch Matters blog of the year, announced at the AARE conference in Adelaide: “Why restoring trust in teaching now could fix the teacher shortage”. La Trobe’s Babak Dadvand wrote a compelling account of one way to address the teacher shortage.

It is genuinely hard to choose the best because every single blog reveals new ideas and new thinking about education but I’ll just list our ten most read for 2022 (and of course, some of our older posts have racked up thousands and thousands of views). So many others were excellent and please look at our comprehensive archive.

Here we go! 2022 top ten.

Babak Dadvand on the teacher shortage.

Why restoring trust in teaching now could fix the teacher shortage

Inger Mewburn: Is this now the Federal government’s most bone-headed idea ever?

Is this now the Federal government’s most bone-headed idea ever?

Debra Hayes: Here’s what a brave new minister for education could do right away to fix the horrific teacher shortage

Here’s what a brave new minister for education could do right away to fix the horrific teacher shortage

Kate de Bruin, Pamela Snow, Linda Graham, Tanya Serry and Jacinta Conway: There are definitely better ways to teach reading

There are definitely better ways to teach reading

Marg Rogers: Time, money, exhaustion: why early childhood educators will join the Great Resignation

Time, money, exhaustion: why early childhood educators will join the Great Resignation

Rachel Wilson: What do you think we’ve got now? Dud teachers or a dud minister? Here are the facts

What do you think we’ve got now? Dud teachers or a dud minister? Here are the facts

Simon Crook: More Amazing Secrets of Band Six (part two ongoing until they fix the wretched thing)

(And part one is now one of our most read posts of all-time)

More Amazing Secrets of Band Six (part two ongoing until they fix the wretched thing)

Alison Bedford and Naomi Barnes: The education minister’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea*

The education minister’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea*

Martina Tassone, Helen Cozmescu, Bree Hurn and Linda Gawne: No. There isn’t one perfect way to teach reading

No. There isn’t one perfect way to teach reading

Thank you to all of you for making this such a lovely community, looking forward to hearing from you and a special thank you to Maralyn Parker who has now been retired from the blog for two years but is still a fantastically supportive human when I need urgent help.

Jenna Price

What do you think we’ve got now? Dud teachers or a dud minister? Here are the facts

Acting Minister for Education, , ,

Part one of a two-part series in response to Stuart Robert’s comments last week. Tomorrow: Anna Sullivan on how the minister’s comments affects teacher retention.

Minister Robert’s comments last week at an Association of an Independent Schools event which claimed public schools are held back by “dud teachers” do more to expose his own bias and failings than it does to reflect on the teaching profession.

The minister has the wrong target. Teachers are not to blame for the sorry state of Australian education. The problem lies with system failings that Minister Robert has responsibility for.

I feel sorely tempted to analyse the bias, political motivations, and the unfounded and illogical reasoning demonstrated by the minister, and apparently his advisors and speechwriters. However, I will stick to my strengths and instead look at evidence and some killer facts. 

There is no data to support the assertion that government schools have weaker teachers. Repeated, and recent, research suggests that government schools performance is  similar to non-government schools in terms of lifting student learning outcomes. Furthermore, there is no data on teacher ability that supports the Ministers’ assertion. The national and embryonic and incomplete Australian Teacher Workforce Data does not include measures of literacy and numeracy, there are no published analyses of LANITE tests. There is just one recent report on adult literacy and numeracy levels among Australian teachers – it doesn’t compare sectors, but I shall explain its significant findings later in point 3.  Sectoral (gov/non-gov) comparisons on teacher workforce have not been done and would be an unhelpful, and potentially inflammatory, distraction from the central problem of inequality in Australian schooling.  There is, however, plenty of evidence, and some killer facts, that show the real system-level challenges in Australian education, and the solutions they require.  

These are the system problems to which Mr Robert needs to attend rather than sling mud at teachers and inflame sectoral infighting :

1. Australia has a problem with educational equity in funding, resourcing and curriculum which, alongside school choice policies, has led to increasing school segregation. Both the OECD and UNICEF have identified this as a key weakness in Australian schooling. School segregation has left many government schools carrying increasing concentrations of disadvantaged students. Within the current context of teacher shortages, iniquitous school funding, increasing workloads and difficult work conditions, many schools find it difficult to staff their classrooms. 

In a survey of 38 wealthy nations Australia ranked 30th on educational inequity and was in the bottom third of nations on each of the schooling stages – preschool, primary and secondary. 

Figure 1: Rankings of equality across three stages of education. From 2018 UNICEF report An Unfair Start: Inequality in Children’s Education in Rich Countries

Solutions:  Lift early childhood participation and duration to ameliorate inequity.  Enact the Gonski school funding reforms, fund all schools to their required School Resource Standard. Address structural problems in schooling, e.g. develop sector blind school obligations, operations and accountabilities for all schools receiving government funding. Provide reforms for curriculum equity, including through online/remote provisions. Monitor and report all educational data for social equity groups. 

2. Australia’s national educational goals have been grossly neglected. There is little, or no, alignment between the goals education ministers put their signatures to in the Mparntwe statement and what is measured in schools and reported in our National Reporting on Schooling. 

This is a gaping hole in educational policy and accountability, matching goals with monitoring and strategy development is foundational to System Accountability 101.  While governments have been busy over the last decade developing frameworks for teacher and school accountability, much needed system and ministerial accountability have been ignored. It is a simple fact that there is currently no monitoring of national goals in students’ confidence, creativity, orientation to lifelong learning, or preparation to be ‘active and informed’ citizens (with the exception of a small amount of sample data available on citizenship education, showing  disappointing results).

What is even more surprising is that equity has not been adequately monitored. Although excellence and equity are generic aspirations, and can be assessed against any data indicator, there is very little analysis and reporting against the equity goal in national reporting documents.

The Measurement Framework for Australian Schooling (MFAS) identifies equity as a key goal and challenge, and suggests that all educational data will be disaggregated and examined in relation to a series of identified equity groups:  “…with a focus on: Indigenous status, sex, language background, geographic location, socioeconomic background, disability.”

However MFAS qualifies this, saying:

“With the exception of retention to Year 12 by Indigenous students, which relates to COAG targets for Closing the Gap, equity measures are not separately listed in the Schedule of Key Performance Measures but are derived, for reporting purposes, by disaggregating the measures for participation, achievement and attainment where it is possible and appropriate to do so. Measures are disaggregated as outlined in the SCSEEC Data Standards Manual.”

Which is to say, there is no follow through on accountability systems for these goals. 

If we examine the pursuit of the educational equity goals in the annual National Report on Schooling, produced by ACARA, we see glaring omissions. The report does acknowledge some equity groupings and, like the MFAS, suggests there will be analysis but, again, only  “where it is possible and appropriate to do so”: 

In the most recent 2019 annual report measures, analysis and reporting are not linked to national goals. Equity is mentioned just six times in the 138 page document, mostly just in preamble. There is no comprehensive analysis against excellence, equity or any other national goal. There is no reporting against disability, LBOTE, SES; and extremely limited reporting on Indigenous students and geolocation. There is more frequent reporting by gender. Further reference to equity for social equity groups directs interested readers to the ACARA data portal to conduct their own analyses of equity! Is that reasonable, diligent attention for our foremost national goal for education? 

Solutions: Include comprehensive analysis of social equity groups within the annual report on schooling. Strategise to address trends, through funding, resourcing and teacher workforce strategy. Develop measures/indicators for all Australian education goals. Commission research to explore key practices in progressing toward educational goals. 

3. Australian teacher workforce management makes us an International outlier. 

The 2018 OECD report  Effective Teacher Policies makes it clear that current teacher workforce management (methinks a lack of management) is directly impacting upon schooling outcomes – excellence and equity. This study used OECD, PIACC adult literacy and numeracy data to explore the strategic placement of teachers. Among wealthy nations, Australia sits apart as we send our most experienced, literate and numerate teachers to our most advantaged schools. Other country systems deliberately strategised to send their best and brightest teachers to the most disadvantaged schools. This has been an imperative for educational equity, effectiveness and economic efficiency, understood and implemented for many decades, but sadly neglected in Australia.

Teacher reports from the same survey also make it clear that disadvantaged schools have worse resources compared to advantaged schools when it comes to:

  • Experience and seniority levels of teachers
  • Proportions of teachers who are trained or certified in all subjects they teach 
  • Proportion of science teachers with temporary teaching contracts

As the majority of disadvantaged schools are within the government sector, this data  suggests that suitable allocation of teachers to disadvantaged government schools is lacking. It does not provide any basis for comparison of government and non-government school teachers. What is more, this represents a structural policy issue, and a ministerial responsibility requiring urgent attention, not 

Solution: Australia needs a national teacher recruitment, retention and allocation policy to address this problem, not to mention teacher shortages and workload issues.  Without one, we are the international outlier here too. Unfortunately, the recent Commonwealth review, failed to present a cohesive strategic framework oriented around key values and principals. A national strategy needs to highlight these (e.g. due respect and recognition of teachers, pursuit of educational goals, equity etc) and lay out aims for how teachers are recruited, trained and distributed to schools. The strategy would also need more effective monitoring, data, research and reporting on  the teacher workforce (building on the ATWD). 

How to break the cycle of neglect?

With better data, reporting, transparency and system-level accountability frameworks, future education Ministers can be less ignorant and more informed, as they comment on issues relating to teachers and how we can all work together to strengthen school education.

The current failings in our education system are now clear, and reflect many years of neglect, particularly in relation to teachers and equity. We urgently need national, politically neutral and collective attention to address the system generated problems currently being faced by schools, teachers, students and parents. With ignorance and misinformation at the helm, I wonder if, as with aged care and disability services, we will need a Royal Commission into education in order to make that happen. It certainly looks like we are heading there. 

Rachel Wilson is associate professor at The Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. She has expertise in educational assessment, research methods and programme evaluation, with broad interests across educational evidence, policy and practice. She is interested in system-level reform and has been involved in designing, implementing and researching many university and school education reforms. Rachel is on Twitter @RachelWilson100

Teachers deserve more than love and praise. They deserve a raise.

teacher attrition, teacher pay, teacher recruitment, teacher unions, teacher workload, Teachers' work, , , , , , , ,

Our second post on the NSW Teachers’ strike

It has been 10 years since NSW public sector teachers have taken industrial action. 

Within that decade, workloads for teachers have exploded, salaries have become uncompetitive, and the teacher shortage in NSW has worsened. 

The education sector is at a tipping point. 

NSW public sector teachers are currently renegotiating a new award to protect and improve their salaries and working conditions. But the findings from the Independent Inquiry into the NSW Teaching Profession chaired by Professor Emeritus Geoff Gallop released in February this year found stark evidence of a profession in crisis. 

The evidence we presented to the Gallop Inquiry painted a picture of worsening working conditions for the profession and highlighted that urgent change is needed. 

Why working conditions need improving

Working hours are unsustainable 

Teacher workloads have reached an unsustainable level. Our research of over 18,000 NSW public sector teachers has highlighted that teachers are now working an average of 55 hours per week. Increased data collection requirements, constant curriculum changes, and more complex student needs have contributed to this.

Our research also found the average teachers’ work undertaken at home is consistently between 11 to 12 hours per week, indicating that work in schools is too great in volume to be undertaken on the school site. 

During school holidays, teachers also work excessive hours, on average 10 hours per week, but up to 40 hours in some cases.

Overburdened with administration

Most teachers who responded to the survey (91%) reported that administrative demands impacted their core work of teaching. Teachers reported they were coping with the challenges of this major administrative load by working longer hours. In NSW, over 96% of teacher-respondents reported that the volume of collection, analysis, and reporting of data had increased over the last five years. 

If these statistics aren’t concerning enough, the voices of teachers speak to the challenges they face:

“I am currently on leave from the head teacher position and am working as a classroom teacher. This decision was due to excessive work hours, averaging 80-plus hours per week in term and 50-plus hours in ‘holidays’ as a head teacher for six years. The stress of this unsustainable workload left me physically exhausted and mentally drained.”

“The paperwork and administrative work has increased enormously.”

“The administrative demands and all the other useless busy work are detracting from the ability of school leaders and staff to engage creatively and to be innovative in the delivery of teaching and learning.”

One teacher recently tweeted his litany of mandated non-teaching tasks. We note it is not exhaustive:

Precarious work is on the rise

Teachers are not only working harder, but undertaking their job in more precarious conditions than ever before.  Fixed-term contract teaching is a growing feature of the NSW public education system. While the category of ‘temporary’ teacher in NSW was established in 2001 in response to growing concerns around casualization and a need to ensure greater employment security for, in particular, women returning to the workforce after having children, today it constitutes an enhanced dimension of precarity within teaching. 

Around 21% of the NSW teaching workforce currently work in temporary roles. Although temporary teachers do similar work to permanent teachers, they often feel as though they work harder. Many perceive they need to ‘do more’ in order to keep their contracted jobs. 

Teachers told us that: 

“I feel there is an unspoken pressure for temp teachers to ‘do more’ in order to heighten their chances to get work for the next year.”

They are “at the whim of principals who pick and choose according to who toes the line.”

Student results are worsening while teacher shortages increase

The evidence from the survey suggested that negative impacts on students were likely to follow if current trends continued. Sadly, this is the situation that has played out with results of Australian students continuing to decline by international comparisons in particular broad-scale testing regimes.

Alongside the workload problem is the worsening teacher shortage in the State. Enrolment growth, an ageing profession and fewer students enrolling to train as teachers means the profession is at risk of “running out of teachers in the next five years”.

Poor pay plus increasing hours and intensity of work will make addressing a teacher shortage extremely difficult. Lifting pay is critical for the sustainability of the profession and is a signal of the increased attention and respect that is long overdue for teachers. Addressing teachers’ current working conditions is also critical to how shortages can be addressed.

Why strike action is on the table

There is no doubt that it has become more difficult for trade unions to legally engage in industrial action, with the parameters for legal industrial action now being so narrow. 

Indeed, after the NSW Teachers’ Federation announced its intended strike action for 24 hours, the NSW Department of Education (successfully) sought no-strike orders from the NSW Industrial Relations Commission.

Teachers are not a militant profession but have a profound sense of care for the students they teach and the work they do in their communities. This is why industrial action is so extraordinary. 

Strike action is often a last resort. But our research has found that teachers can engage in such action when they feel that policies and political decisions are deeply and significantly threatening their core industrial and professional conditions of work, intensified by an uncooperative or dismissive government. The teachers’ union has said teachers feel this way. 

Striking is most successful when teachers are collectively aggrieved about multiple deficiencies in the system brought on by the policies of managerialist governments, like poor job security, increasing class sizes, undermining the professional status of teachers, increasing workloads, and bureaucratic models of performance management. 

An uncooperative government can also activate teachers to mobilise when governments are either openly hostile towards teachers and their union, or fail to consult with them on policies that affect their conditions of work. 

There are few occasions in history where NSW teachers have flexed their industrial muscle to take a stand against marketization and managerialism that eroded teachers’ working conditions. In one of the largest demonstrations in Australian labour history, some 80,000 teachers descended on The Domain in Sydney on 17 August 1988 to protest against the Greiner/Metherell cuts to public education funding and market-driven policies. 

The suite of pressure points currently facing the teaching profession brought on by a challenging reform environment sets the scene to rival the success of the 1988 strike. According to Buchanan, “today’s teachers would need a 15 per cent pay rise to restore them to their wage status three decades ago alongside comparable professions”. Given that, the demands seem very reasonable. 

Teachers’ voices must be heard now. If not, it will be too late. 

From left to right: Rachel Wilson is Associate Professor at The Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. She has expertise in educational assessment, research methods and programme evaluation, with broad interests across educational evidence, policy and practice. She is interested in system-level reform and has been involved in designing, implementing and researching many university and school education reforms. Rachel is on Twitter@RachelWilson100 Susan McGrath-Champ is Professor in the Work and Organisational Studies Discipline at the University of Sydney Business School, Australia. Her research includes the geographical aspects of the world of work, employment relations and international human resource management. Recent studies include those of school teachers’ work and working conditions. Meghan Stacey is a former high school English and drama teacher and current lecturer in the School of Education at UNSW Sydney. Meghan’s primary research interests sit at the intersection of sociological theory, policy sociology and the experiences of those subject to systems of education. Meghan’s PhD was conferred in April 2018. Meghan is on Twitter @meghanrstacey Mihajla Gavin is a lecturer in the Business School at the University of Technology Sydney, and has worked as a senior officer in the public sector in Australia across various workplace relations advisory, policy and project roles. Mihajla’s research is concerned with analysing the response of teacher unions to neoliberal education reform that has affected teachers’ conditions of work. Mihajla is on Twitter @Mihajla_Gavin

Will the Quality Time Action Plan reduce teacher workload?

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Teachers want more time for lesson planning, not less.

Last week, the NSW Department of Education released the Quality Time Action Plan, intended to “simplify administrative practices in schools”. Having highlighted the concerning growth in administrative workload in schools in a report based on a survey of more than 18,000 teachers for the NSW Teachers Federation in 2018, we were excited to hear about this development. 

A way forward for reducing administrative workload?

The Plan provides a commitment to “freeing up time”, through a targeted “reduction of 40 hours of low-value administrative tasks per teacher per year”. Administrative work was the overriding concern for teachers in our workload survey, with more than 97% of teachers reporting an increase in administrative requirements in the five prior years. Further research shows that the heavy workload of teachers pre-pandemic was intensified by COVID19 in 2020. As researchers in the field and advocates for the important work of teachers, we find it encouraging to see tangible efforts made to address teacher workload.

According to the Plan, issues with administration are to be addressed through six “opportunity areas”: 1) curriculum resources and support, 2) assessment and reporting to parents and carers, 3) accreditation, 4) processes and support services, 5) extracurricular activities, and 6) data collection and analysis. Some of these areas, especially data collection and analysis, resonate with what we heard from teachers in our 2018 survey. And importantly, some of the actions in the Action Plan do seem to provide tangible reductions in the time teachers spend on this kind of work, such as automating data processing that was previously manual. 

Avoiding the narrowing of teachers’ work

But other target areas of the Plan were more surprising to us, particularly those around curriculum. The Plan acknowledges that “skilled programming and lesson planning are a critical part of teaching” – but also states that “this task can be quite time consuming”. It offers to improve “the accessibility and quality of teacher resources” to “save hours of time teachers previously used creating and searching for content”. We’re not the only ones who were surprised by this inclusion – we noted plenty of social media discussion from teachers about it last Friday after the plan was released to them. 

We don’t have access to all of the data upon which the Department is basing its Plan. Maybe there are teachers who have called for more assistance in programming and lesson planning. There is, to our knowledge, no published research suggesting that this is a problematic workload area for teachers, although it has been a noted challenge in relation to conversion to remote teaching during the pandemic. This Plan strategy does seem to be at odds with the findings of our survey that teachers’ most valued activity, the one that they saw as most important and necessary, was “planning and preparation of lessons”. Similarly, teachers reported wanting more time for “developing new units of work and/or teaching programs”. They did not want to do less of this kind of work, in contrast to what the Plan seems to propose. 

According to policy analyst and scholar Carol Bacchi, policy documents always serve to create or give shape to policy problems. That is, for Bacchi, any ‘solution’ given in a policy is actively constructing a particular kind of ‘problem’ to be addressed. So it’s interesting that the Plan constructs class preparation as part of the teacher workload ‘problem’. This suggests that the problem isn’t that teachers need more time to do their preparation, but that the way in which they have been preparing in the past has been inefficient, with the solution to instil a more centralised approach. While teachers may be appreciative of such resources, it’s not what they advocated in our survey, where the top recommended strategy was to reduce face-to-face teaching time to facilitate a closer focus on collaboration for planning, programming, assessing and reporting. Similarly, we note that the NSW Teachers Federation salaries and conditions campaign launched last week, ‘More Than Thanks’, is – along with higher salaries – calling for an increase in preparation time of two hours a week, to enable this kind of work. 

There are also other interesting framings of the teacher workload problem in the Plan. For example, the support around data collection and analysis seems to be mostly about ‘streamlining’ existing requirements rather than removing them. This tells us that the perceived problem is not the data itself but how it is collected and reported. 

Lesson planning is core to teachers’ work 

Given that the Action Plan’s intended focus is on ‘administration’, this makes us wonder what ‘administration’ in teaching is understood to include. What is considered ‘administration’ and therefore peripheral, and what is considered ‘teaching’ and therefore core? This is quite a high-stakes question. Because if we position some aspects of teachers’ work as simply ‘administration’, then we run the risk of sidelining work that teachers value as part of their professional identity, such as the creative and intellectual work of lesson planning. 

We are wary of any policy approach which re-purposes concerns over workload as an opportunity to control or limit the central pedagogical labour of teachers. Reforms which chip away at the core work of teachers, where both societal contribution and teacher satisfaction is most concentrated, run the risk of damaging the profession and the education system it carries.

This may not be what happens under the Quality Time Action Plan. But given recent concerns over the commercialisation of education data and resourcing, it is worth asking whether it would be the profession itself providing centralised programming and planning resources, or if this would be outsourced. 

Teachers’ voices matter: give your feedback 

There is an opportunity to provide feedback on the Action Plan. We encourage teachers – those who live these matters each and every day – to fill in the feedback form. Workload issues are as complex as they are important, and we heartily welcome the ongoing efforts of all stakeholders to effectively support the people who staff our schools. 

Rachel Wilson is Associate Professor at The Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. She has expertise in educational assessment, research methods and programme evaluation, with broad interests across educational evidence, policy and practice. She is interested in system-level reform and has been involved in designing, implementing and researching many university and school education reforms. Rachel is on Twitter @RachelWilson100

Susan McGrath-Champ is Professor in the Work and Organisational Studies Discipline at the University of Sydney Business School, Australia. Her research includes the geographical aspects of the world of work, employment relations and international human resource management. Recent studies include those of school teachers’ work and working conditions.

Meghan Stacey is a former high school English and drama teacher and current lecturer in the School of Education at UNSW Sydney. Meghan’s primary research interests sit at the intersection of sociological theory, policy sociology and the experiences of those subject to systems of education. Meghan’s PhD was conferred in April 2018. Meghan is on Twitter @meghanrstacey

Mihajla Gavin is a lecturer in the Business School at the University of Technology Sydney, and has worked as a senior officer in the public sector in Australia across various workplace relations advisory, policy and project roles. Mihajla’s research is concerned with analysing the response of teacher unions to neoliberal education reform that has affected teachers’ conditions of work. Mihajla is on Twitter @Mihajla_Gavin

Scott Fitzgerald is an associate professor and discipline lead of the People, Culture and Organisations discipline group in the School of Management at Curtin University. Scott’s research presently covers two main areas: the changing nature of governance, professionalism and work in the education sector.