teacher workforce

a serious young teacher near the board

Readiness to teach? That will take time and development

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When it comes to new teachers, there is an expectation that they are “classroom ready” from day one on the job.  

Yet there is mounting evidence that new teachers are being sent into schools that are short-staffed and where experienced teachers are leaving the profession, feeling high levels of stress and burn out.  

Clearly, even at the best of times, teaching is a complex profession. Developing proficiency to work in this kind of context requires time, experience, and supported opportunities for feedback and reflection.  

“Classroom readiness” has become a buzzword in education policy and teacher education; all initial teacher education providers need to assess graduates’ readiness through Teaching Performance Assessments. 

Given that it is so challenging to create workplaces that keep experienced teachers in the profession, our research looked at these expectations of new teachers.  We conducted a scoping review to examine what ‘classroom readiness’ means, and whether or not it can – or should – be assessed. 

Assessing new teachers’ classroom readiness 

We found that classroom readiness is conceptualised in three broad ways: as adherence to a set of regulations and standards; as a policy construct; and as a professional journey. 

Given the requirement that all initial education providers assess pre-service teachers through Teaching Performance Assessments according to teacher professional standards, it is not surprising that much of the literature defines classroom readiness according to these standards. There has been an ongoing discussion about the suitability of this approach for some time.  Back in 2009, Connell described teacher standards this way: 

What teachers do is decomposed into specific, auditable competencies and performances. The framework is not only specified in managerialist language. It embeds an individualised model of the teacher that is deeply problematic for a public education system. The arbitrariness of the dot-point lists means that any attempt to enforce them, on the practice of teachers or on teacher education programmes, will mean an arbitrary narrowing of practice. (p. 220) 

As a policy construct, classroom readiness is used by governments and regulatory bodies to justify reforms in teacher education, and to reassure the public that teacher educators are held to high standards. This approach has seen initial teacher education providers absorb the high costs associated with implementing and moderating teaching performance assessments.  

Finally, others describe readiness as an ongoing journey of growth and development rather than a fixed state that can be measured at a single point in time.  Even the best beginning teachers continue to learn and adapt as they encounter new challenges and contexts. This view argues that they should not be expected to be fully prepared from the start.  Authors in this final group instead advocate for adequate recognition of the complex and relational aspects of teaching that cannot be assessed in a TPA.  

The problem with “readiness”  

The first problem with the rhetoric of ‘readiness’ is that it has the potential to place unrealistic expectations on beginning teachers.  Assessing readiness through a narrow lens that has a focus on planning, teaching, assessment and reflection has the potential to gloss over the support that new teachers really need.   

Teachers’ work is primarily relational in nature and measuring classroom readiness overlooks aspects of teaching that are hard to quantify, but yet are foundational for teaching and learning. Teaching is complex and one assessment cannot capture the diverse contexts and level of adaptability and resilience required of beginning teachers.   

The second problem with readiness is that there is no agreement across the literature, or even in policy itself, about how it could be possible to assess whether a new teacher can do everything from supporting students experiencing complex trauma, through to managing excessive workloads. The OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2018 indicates that Australian teachers report higher levels of stress than the OECD average and that 30% to 50% of all teachers leave the profession in the first five years.  This is the context into which new teachers find themselves.  A serious question is whether it is realistic for anyone to be ‘ready’ for these circumstances; and if so, how it would be possible to assess readiness to work in these conditions. 

It takes a system to support beginning teachers  

It is not realistic to expect that just because new teachers can plan and teach a lesson during a supervised placement, they are fully prepared for the complex schools where they are likely to work. In fact, expecting beginning teachers to work independently from day one, without sufficient ongoing mentoring, risks reinforcing the very conditions that push more experienced teachers out of the profession. 

It is undoubtedly important that ITE programs equip pre-service teachers with strong understandings of curriculum and assessment, teaching practices, and student diversity.  However, if we want beginning teachers to have long and rewarding careers, they must be met with appropriate support once they enter the profession. Recent research shows that beginning teachers need support that is specific to their context, which requires sustained government investment. 

This is not to say there are any easy solutions for how to support new teachers. Experienced teachers are already operating at their limits, particularly in hard-to-staff schools where teacher shortages and turnover have substantially increased the workload of experienced teachers. Without adequate resourcing for time release, reduced teaching loads, professional development and networking, mentor teachers themselves risk burnout, further compromising the support new teachers need.  

It is understandable that policy makers and systems want assurance that new teachers are ready to tackle the demands of the job from day one. However, the real-world complexities of teaching mean that no amount of preservice teacher preparation can full equip graduates for every situation they will encounter. What beginning teachers need are fair workloads, ongoing mentoring, opportunities for collaboration, and access to professional learning that is responsive to the evolving demands of their specific school context. 

A professional journey of growth

Rather than viewing classroom readiness around a set of standards to be achieved by the end of a degree, we should view it as the beginning of a professional journey of growth.  New teachers require time, support, mentorship and opportunities to reflect and learn as they navigate the demands of their early years in the classroom.

Nerida Spina is an associate professor at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Nerida’s research expertise is teaching and leadership for equity and social justice. Rebecca Spooner-Lane is an associate professor at the Queensland University of Technology. Her research explores the professional development and career progression of teachers from graduate to lead teacher. You can find her on LinkedIn. Elizabeth Briant is an associate lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology. Her research explores contemporary social conditions that shape the growing use of private tutoring in Australia. Julia Mascadri is a senior lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology. Her research interests include pedagogical practice in early childhood education, educational leadership, and assessment in initial teacher education. You can find her on  LinkedIn

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What teachers need now (or ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!’)

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This is the fourth in a series of posts on AARE’s education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about boosting the teacher workforce. This post develops some of the themes we published earlier today on boosting the teacher workforce.

It is expensive to become a school teacher – for the individual and for government. It is a great calling, but why do relatively few stay for the longer term? There is no simple answer, and both researchers and policymakers must avoid the temptation of simple solutions. One touted solution is to reduce the burden on teachers by removing all the non-class duties that have built up over the years. This ‘busy work’ does create workload pressures and is cited as a reason teachers leave the profession.

Yet an important part of non-class time is researching and planning for time spent with students. This has always been part of teaching. Unfortunately, this work is often labelled ‘busy work’ alongside administration and compliance tasks. In accordance with this labelling, generative AI and pre-produced curriculum resources are increasingly harnessed to replace teachers’ own research and planning.

Teachers are ethically bound to adjust resources

These are ‘solutions’ that must be closely scrutinised, for teachers value research and planning. Research shows teachers feel obliged to make modifications because they know their students and are ethically bound to adjust resources to suit them. So, even if resources are purchased to save teachers’ time, teachers have to devote time anyway to ensure materials meet the needs of their students. This kind of assistance may not be the panacea to teacher workload that it is imagined to be.

AI-generated and off-the-shelf resources are never able to anticipate the diverse needs of real students. Teachers know they have to use their professional discretion to fine-tune even the best of supplied resources. The understanding of students’ needs that guides curriculum adjustment is built on rapport with students. This social-emotional work is vital to teachers’ (and students’) wellbeing. It is undermined when teachers are made to use resources without scope for interpretation.

Teachers’ interpretive work with curriculum and resources is highly skilled and intensely difficult. The interpretive process not only calls for fine-grained attunement to students’ needs, but the curriculum and resources always need to be related back to broader knowledge and skills. For instance, maths curriculum is a sort of shorthand for certain mathematical skills and knowledge. Teachers have to unpack the knowledge and skills implicit in curriculum and resources to make learning come to life. This creative work taps into teachers’ own interests and expertise and is one of the sources of joy in planning.

Teachers’ interpretive work is nearly invisible to the casual observer

Teachers’ interpretive work (to serve diverse students, and to unpack knowledge and skills) is nearly invisible to the casual observer. However, it is critical to ensuring official curriculum is converted to quality learning. Early evidence suggests that standardising curriculum resources – that is, to replace this work with off-the-shelf resources – increases the dissatisfaction of teachers. Teachers need to interpret curriculum rather than recite it. They deeply value the work of lesson planning and preparation in their roles. Maybe it is the invisibility of this work that prompts people outside education to undervalue it?

To help education ministers and bureaucrats in their well-intentioned efforts to improve the lives of teachers and make the profession more attractive, researchers need to clarify the professional need to interpret and plan for quality learning. We need research that can explain the links between planning and performing in classrooms, and how teachers’ work satisfaction is implicated. 

We also need policy makers who are capable of a nuanced response to the needs of teachers, who are open to the complexities of teachers’ work and with that, wary of simple solutions.

Steven Hodge is director of the Griffith Institute for Educational Research (GIER). His research focuses on the relationship between curriculum development and the work of educators. Emily Ross is deputy director of Teaching and Learning and Director of Primary Programs in the School of Education at The University of Queensland. Emily’s curriculum interpretation and implementation research has shaped government policy in Queensland and Australia

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Just because you went to school doesn’t make you an expert on teaching

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This is the second in a series of posts on education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about boosting the teacher workforce.

If we’re genuine about addressing the teacher shortage and retaining the excellent teachers we already have in the system – not just recruiting more of the ‘best and brightest’ so we can burn them out – we could start by making the decision to stop infantilizing teachers. 

For example, it’s common to read about “teachers being left to fend for themselves” in the classroom because of a lack of standardised curriculum resources that would do the thinking for them and take the load off. It’s a line that dates to a Grattan Institute report from 2022 that’s been taken up with great enthusiasm by some sections of the media (like here and here, and here for the glorious metaphor of “rudderless teachers”, this time attributed to the current Minister himself). 

Part of the problem is the disconnect between what the work of the teacher is and what most of the population thinks the work of the teacher is. 

We might think that because we went to school, and/or have kids who go to school, that we know what teachers do: the job is to show up at the front of the class from 9am to 3pm every day for a scant 40 weeks a year. Right? 

Wrong. That would work if teaching was a performance (although even then they’d presumably need to do a little rehearsal?). But it’s not.

Conditions for learning

The actual job of the teacher is to create the conditions for learning. For everyone in the class – that’s usually 25 to 30 individuals at a time.  To do that effectively, you need to know every one of those students. You need to understand what they bring into the classroom. What they already know. What they’re passionate about. What their strengths are. What they need to work on. Whether they had breakfast this morning. And so on. This is not a newfangled idea: it’s based on decades of research across both psychology and sociology of education. 

And that’s what’s wrong with the relentless messaging about how great it would be if all teachers used standardised lesson plans and resources – the so-called “low variance” approach. I’d argue that it’s very last century, but the truth is that the idea of a one-size-fits-all school experience doesn’t just belong in the 20thcentury, it belongs in the dark ages. Anyone who thinks we can standardise our way to an education system that will prepare our young people for the turbulent times they’re going to navigate, hasn’t been paying attention for at least 20 years.  

Kids need access to powerful knowledge

And the same is true for the baseless idea that knowledge somehow gets magically transmitted from the brain of the teacher to the brains of students. Kids need access to powerful knowledge, there’s no doubt about that. And they need teachers who can help them learn it, provide feedback along the way when they get things wrong, and drive them to expand and improve in their learning. But we won’t get there with scripted or standardised lessons that spray the classroom with ‘knowledge’ (let’s call it ‘content’) in the hope that some of it will stick. 

It’s time to recognise that teachers have specialised, professional knowledge that goes beyond what you might have imagined  while sitting in a classroom for 13 years. Just like doctors, physiotherapists, lawyers and IT specialists have specialised knowledge that is, effectively, what we pay them for.  The difference is that we expect (and hope) that our brain surgeon knows more about brain surgery than we do, while we seem quite comfortable subjecting teachers’ knowledge to some kind of pub test. 

Teachers are human

The more we assume that teachers need think tanks or economists or politicians or anyone else to ‘help them fend’, the more it feeds the teacher shortage. Teachers are human. If they don’t feel valued, and are constantly exposed to arguments about their work mounted by people with strong views but next to no actual knowledge of their work, it’s hard to keep showing up.

Respect matters. Valuing what teachers actually know and do, and recognising that it’s complex and that laypeople (and that includes politicians) might not necessarily understand its intricacies would be a pathway to reinstating trust in the teaching profession. And that might just be the perfect place to start in supporting a vital profession in crisis. 

Nicole Mockler is professor of education at the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney and Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Education, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on education policy, teachers’ work, and education and the media. 

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Breakthrough: what we should do to build our teacher workforce

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This is the first in a series of posts on education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about boosting the teacher workforce.

Want to fix the teacher shortage? Start by giving teachers time to do their jobs 

Teachers aren’t leaving the profession because they’ve stopped caring. They’re leaving because they’re burnt out. Each day, they’re pulled in multiple directions, constantly interrupted, and overwhelmed by a stack of disjointed tasks. 

We call this time poverty, and it’s not a personal failing, it’s a systemic failing. The way teachers’ time is governed in schools is unsustainable. Unless this becomes an election priority, the workforce crisis will only deepen.

The cascade of constant demands

Using ‘time use’ data from our ARC Linkage project, we found that regardless of how positively a teacher began their day, they almost always ended it feeling rushed and overwhelmed by the volume of tasks they were managing. 

Importantly, teachers weren’t reporting this experience as an isolated bad day. It was their everyday reality. Teachers across all demographics, including school type and location, reported the same thing: they simply don’t have enough time to meet the demands placed on them.

The structure of the school day magnifies this problem. Teachers’ time is tightly managed, divided into timetabled periods, quick transitions between classes and subjects, and a series of fixed duties and meetings. 

No flexibility

There’s no flexibility to absorb the unexpected. 

A single disruption, like a behaviour incident, an unscheduled parent meeting, or an unexpected playground duty, can derail the rest of their day. We call this the cascade effect. When one task is delayed it pushes everything else – particularly those tasks that require focused attention like lesson planning, marking, and parent emails – into the evening.

The more these disruptions happen, the less time teachers have to do the work that professionally sustains them: the creative, relational, and intellectually rich parts of the job. Instead, their days become cycles of triage, where the goal is simply survival.

A problem of governance 

Time poverty in teaching is an effect of how teachers’ work is governed. Over the past decades, education systems have layered administrative tasks, performative accountability, and compliance mechanisms on top of the core business of teaching. This intensification reflects a model of governance that values documentation, oversight, and metric-driven performance.

It also shifts how time is experienced. We know the typical school day is increasingly fragmented, filled with interruptions, triaged priorities, high-stakes decision making and cognitively complex multitasking. Teachers often internalise these pressures, interpreting exhaustion as normal and equating busyness with professional commitment. In this way, overwork becomes not just expected, but legitimised.

Crucially, this culture of overwork is not experienced equally. It is deeply gendered. Women, who make up the majority of the teaching workforce, often shoulder the emotional labour of schooling alongside caregiving responsibilities at home. Many of the women we interviewed in our research described feeling torn between the expectations of their roles as teachers and their roles as caregivers. They feel they are never quite able to do enough in either space. 

While other professions have embraced flexibility and remote work, teaching necessarily requires a teacher in the classroom, working face-to-face with students. This physical presence is vital, not only for effective instruction, but also for the relational and pastoral dimensions of teaching that support student wellbeing. But the issue lies in how time is managed around this need. Teachers are still expected to be constantly available beyond the school day, even when they’re unwell. Many report having to prepare detailed lesson plans and resources for relief staff while sick or caring for others. In fact, some told us that they couldn’t take a day off because their students’ needs were too complex to entrust to someone else.

Physical presence

Teachers can never switch off from being available. They can never switch off from the emotional labour of caring for their students. 

Very few teachers reported they slept well at night, despite their exhaustion. This inflexible model of care-driven self-sacrifice is unsustainable. It also places a disproportionate burden on women, and continues to push them out of the profession.

Make teachers’ time a policy priority

It might be tempting to address the challenge of time poverty by offering quick fixes, like AI lesson planning. But this time dividend approach misses the point. Teachers value their lesson planning time. What they don’t value is being pulled into another initiative that draws them away from their core purpose.

Teachers don’t just need fewer hours. They need fewer heavy hours, with less disruption, less triaging, more predictability. That means giving teachers time not only to plan and teach, but to recover, reflect, and connect with students and colleagues in meaningful ways. It also means providing appropriate welfare support in schools to assist with student wellbeing. 

As we head into this election, all parties must treat teacher time as a policy priority. Workforce sustainability won’t be solved through recruitment alone; we need to focus on retention by making the job one that teachers can realistically and sustainably do. That means investing in time-conscious governance that not only reduces administrative burden but also values teacher autonomy, prioritises their wellbeing, and respects their need for a life beyond the classroom.

Anna Hogan is associate professor in the School of Education, Queensland University of Technology. Her research interests broadly focus on education marketisation, and related issues of privatisation and commercialisation. Her current research projects include: philanthropy in Australian public schools, teacher and school leader time poverty and the role of commercial curriculum resources on teachers’ work.

The way teachers work must change now. The Scott report doesn’t even try to fix the real challenge

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There is a collective sigh of frustration from education academics when initial teacher education (ITE) is yet again the subject of review, with a series of recommendations that promise to transform not only ITE, but the teaching profession. Apparently the problems with the teaching profession are entirely the result of the failures of ITE. 

It is also crucial to consider these most recent recommendations in context – they are  the most recent in what has been a decade of ITE reform. 

Released on July 7 and titled Strong Beginnings: Report of the Teacher Education Expert Panel, this review has 14 recommendations across four domains, reflecting the earlier discussion paper: strengthening ITE programs to deliver confident, effective beginning teachers (which is mostly about embedding core content); strengthening the link between performance and funding of ITE programs (which is mostly about reporting and data); improving the quality of practical experiences in teaching; and improving access to postgraduate ITE for mid-career entrants.   

The opening sentence in the executive summary, “[T]he importance of great teachers cannot be overstated”, is uncontestable – thank you – we agree.  The closing paragraph provides the rationale and context for the recommendations that follow, acknowledging the “major reforms” progressed under Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG, 2014) and noting “but there is still more to do”.  

Warning bells – tinkering with ITE will not be a panacea for the workforce shortage challenges facing the sector, with ITE a small part of the much more complex landscape, and with a long lead time to take effect.  

I read the report and recommendations from the informed and insider position as a Dean of Education, Chair of the Queensland Council of Deans of Education, program accreditation panellist and chairperson; for the duration of the time we collectively traversed the intense period rolling-out the reforms of TEMAG. 

It was indeed major – and very costly – reform.  Only recently, around the nation, have those reforms been fully implemented.  And we even have a few graduates who have journeyed through these new programs. It is important to acknowledge their added length combined with the time it takes to complete the programs – for many enrolled part-time due to the tough economic environment that demands they work alongside their study. 

We have only a few years of graduates from these TEMAGed programs so we don’t yet know the impact of the major reforms.  Hence, the value and impact of the TEMAG initiatives are not yet known in terms of the profession and workforce – in fact there is a gap in research about many aspects of ITE, a point clearly made in the report. 

The recommendations thus are appended to a significantly revamped ITE sector that has not had the benefit of resources to research and review the effects of major reform. 

The big shifts resulting from TEMAG include: additional non-academic requirements for entry to ITE; the Literary and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education (LANTITE); program standards; and demonstrating classroom readiness through the Teaching Performance Assessment (TPA), as a final hurdle, alongside mandatory volumes of learning and consistent professional experience time allocation. Some of these reforms are dubious in terms of adding quality and value and the cost benefit analysis for ITE, but none has been contested in the report recommendations. That’s a missed opportunity.   

There are some recommendations in the report that could be silver linings. Acknowledging the need for additional funding to research ITE and resourcing this deficit, and the intention to consider TPAs comparatively, are standouts for me. This makes sense as the focus should be on the readiness and novice expertise of ITE graduates about to enter the workforce, taking into account the learning and value that comes from their ITE program.  

Other glimmers of hope among the recommendations include: establishing a separate authority for oversight and achieving national consistency (contentious, but important); greater visibility of mentor teachers; and the importance of investing in professional experience by all members of the profession, which is a key aspect of program retention and identity development for ITE students. The mechanics for activating these innovations however, is lacking, so these might more properly be regarded as potential positives. The current demands on the ITE sector to meet accreditation requirements are significant, so adding to that does mean additional workload for tertiary educators, hence it is refreshing to see funding for transition and funding for the establishment of leadership institutions.  This is happening at a time when the number of tertiary experts in education is also depleted consequential to universities tightening their belts, so a reasonable implementation timeline will be crucial.

Less convincing is the need to specify core content. The question of what is core has been narrowed to four areas that appear, frankly, to be incontestable and likely already to feature in ITE programs in the country. It will be the necessary changes to standards that will take the time and the task of making visible the core content for compliance assurances, and the relative volume of learning and level of prescription that is yet to be defined that will undoubtedly cause consternation for the implementation of the core content recommendations. And the question of what is to be removed from programs is already sounding around the nation – adding more means something has to go. The loss of agility and likelihood of sameness is thus concerning, cookie cutter education programs seem to be the antithesis of what we need to ensure we attract and graduate a diverse teacher workforce.

Importantly, refinements in ITE do not solve the problem of workforce shortages in classrooms today.  

There is extensive research that points to the need for a major shift in the way we do schooling today.  The way teachers work also needs to change.  This is crucial for the necessary transformation that is needed to reset school education to reflect the needs of contemporary society.  The TEEP recommendations work within our current system and can be considered as an incremental step in the bigger challenge of transforming our schooling sector and the teachers entering it.

Professor Donna Pendergast is the Director of Engagement in the Arts, Education and Law Group and former Dean and Head of the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University. Her research expertise is education transformation and efficacy.

Nightmare so far away: the truth about why teachers can’t live where they work

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School systems are struggling to find enough teachers to cover classes. Projections indicate that in New South Wales alone there is a need for an additional 13,000 teachers in the next decade to meet student demand. This growth is mainly centred around Greater Sydney. Significantly, much of the growth is in areas not traditionally thought of as hard-to-staff. With such growth comes pressure on housing and concurrently with the teacher shortage, NSW (as with much of Australia) is grappling with a housing affordability crisis. 

What becomes of a school system – and individual schools – if teachers cannot afford to live near, or even within commuting distance of their workplace?

In a recently paper published in the Australian Educational Researcher, I show how 90.8 percent of teaching positions in New South Wales, representing more than 50,000 Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) positions, are located in Local Government Areas (LGA) where the median rent and house sales price is severely unaffordable on a top-of-the-scale teacher salary.

The effects are felt most strongly by early career teachers. Using official quarterly sales and rental reports, there are 675 schools or 22,703 FTE teaching positions located in LGAs where the median rent for a one-bedroom place is unaffordable for new graduate teachers. Attracting new members into the profession when housing – even one-bedroom places – are unaffordable is a tough sell.

Not limited to new graduates, there are 70 schools or 2,059 FTE teaching positions located in LGAs where even a top-of-the-scale teacher (non-promotional position) cannot afford a one-bedroom dwelling. The most unaffordable LGAs are Bayside, Canada Bay, Sydney, and Waverley – all located in the inner circle of Greater Sydney (see Figures 5-8 of the paper).

And when it comes to house sales prices, forget about it. Median prices for both strata and non-strata properties are well in excess of the 3:1 ratio of cost to annual salary (ranging up to greater than 11:1). The attached figure displays an updated snapshot of the median non-strata sales price by LGA as a multiple of the top-of-the-scale teacher salary. Put simply, for a single teacher income household, or even a two teacher income household, the median sales price up and down the eastern seaboard is unaffordable. This has major implications for the health of the school system.

Substantial attention has been granted to the idea of the 15 minute city in recent times. While commute times in Australian cities are comparable to similar sized cities elsewhere, for many the daily commute is more likely to be 30 or even 60 minutes in cities like Sydney. In most cases, this is simply because it is too expensive to live any closer to work – but takes a toll on those commuting.

The impact of housing affordability on the teacher shortage has not received too much attention in public debate within Australia. Understandably, issues of workload, behaviour, conditions, salaries, and initial teacher education have dominated the headlines. This has allowed the issue of housing affordability to expand without pressure to intervene.

Housing affordability issues are most likely to impact schools that have traditionally been seen as desirable locations. Schools that have in the past, not had difficulties recruiting and retaining staff. But if nothing changes, they will simply be unaffordable and inaccessible for all but those already living in the area. This is what makes the intersection of housing affordability and the teacher shortage an urgent and timely matter. At the same time, it is a messy policy area. There is no simple fix, and arguably the time for action was 10+ years ago. However, not acting now just amplifies the problem.

The issue is of course not limited to teachers. It is felt by all essential workers. The Government’s shared equity scheme was a step in the right direction. So too is the investment of Aware Super in essential worker developments. These are consistent with interventions overseas where districts and local authorities build housing developments and incentivise educators. But piecemeal policy approaches will not address the issue at scale.   


No one government department or organisational body has ultimate responsibility for housing essential workers, but we all have a stake in it. Work underway at the Gonski Institute is hoping to raise the profile of the issue and engage governments, policy makers, industry representatives, and educators in developing viable options. This initial paper in AER is the first step of many.

Scott Eacott PhD, is deputy director of the Gonski Institute for Education, and professor of education in the School of Education at UNSW Sydney and adjunct professor in the Department of Educational Administration at the University of Saskatchewan.