PRINCIPAL REPORT

From the College Principal

You may well have seen recent reports in the media about the national teacher shortage. It is not in dispute that recruiting and retaining teachers in the public sector is extremely challenging at the moment, and has been problematic for a number of years.

Today, I wanted to explore why this is the case, and the things we can do to help. From the outset, I want to make it clear that these are my personal views, not those of the Department of Education and Training (DET).

Workload

When I began my teaching career back in the late 1980’s, the expectations of what was considered adequate professional practice were very different. It was considered perfectly fine to distribute a class set of text books, ask the students to read pages 243-257, and then answer questions 1-17 on page 262. In full sentences. In silence. Again. 

Formative assessment to diagnose the individual point of need for every child in the classroom was virtually unheard of. Individual learning plans for students with different or additional needs were rare. Extension activities for the “bright” students meant giving them the privilege of completing an extra five questions. Student voice was not sought, and rarely considered. Teachers typically interacted with parents twice a year at parent-teacher evenings, unless something quite out of the ordinary happened. Parents gave very full license for teachers to set boundaries and apply sanctions to create order in their classrooms. Teachers were allowed to get on with their work with almost complete autonomy from the DET and, often, their colleagues. Monitoring of teacher performance was limited. Accountability processes for teachers were basic. 

Today, the opposite of all of this is true. Today, the time given to teachers to prepare, assess and complete all the non-teaching tasks is the same as it was in back then, whilst at the same time the complexity, expectations of, and detail of teacher work now is vastly greater. In my view, whilst the planned reduction in face-to-face teaching time in the new industrial agreement is a step in the right direction, it remains manifestly inadequate to allow teachers to perform at the level parents, and the system they work for, expects of them. 

So, the question is, why would you enter a profession, and if you do, stay in one, which sets teachers the Sisyphean task of creating excellent learning experiences for their students in class, whilst the entire system is set up make their labour unreasonably difficult and demanding? 

Because the overwhelming majority of teachers care, they do the many extra hours of work to meet the demands set out above. Potential aspirant teachers know this and often say, “No thanks.” Current teachers do this, and in vast numbers, before they reach their fifth year in the profession say, “That’s enough.”

Whilst It is easy for me to say face-to-face teaching time should be further reduced, there is an underlying conundrum. How do you reduce the face-to-face teaching time of teachers when you don’t have an adequate supply of teachers to maintain the current work force, let alone enlarge it, as would have to be done to achieve this goal? I don’t have the answer for this, but I do know the DET has set up new structures to address these challenges.

Respect

Back in 2019, I wrote a piece in these pages which asked if are we are raising the most fragile children ever. I sent that piece to well-known psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, and parenting author Steven Biddulph, for comment. They both endorsed the piece, but Steven made a very insightful comment, which I think remains true. 

He said,

  "…I think that some parents have drifted into seeing school as a consumer product to complain about, rather than a collaborative effort between parents and school for the best growth of children.  And that attitude quickly is taken on by the kids too. Some difficulty, sacrifice, and being one of the team is an essential lesson for life, and within moderation, it’s good to let our kids learn that.”

The point is that, when I began my career, parents acknowledged that I was an expert in my field, and that, with few exceptions, my decision-making in respect to their child should be accepted and respected. I am not saying teachers should somehow be above reproach, criticism or complaint. What I am saying is that the attitudes about what education represents has changed. As Steven said, it seems to now be viewed more as a consumer item which, like any other, can be returned, exchanged, changed or complained about if the product does not exactly meet the consumer’s every expectation.

This means that, whilst teachers complete their complex work, they are, unlike many other professions, regularly forced to justify their decisions when there is even slight disagreement from their students or the parents of. 

How can we help? Knowing that teachers make at least 1500 decisions a day on everything from deciding to swap a room because the heater has broken, to considering whether to intervene to stop two students talking in the back row, or just waiting to see if they settle down, we need to respect the difficulty and complexity of their work, and respect their decisions. In particular, we need to recognise that many of these decisions are situational and bound within time frames of minutes or even seconds. We need to think about the umpires officiating a game of football to get a sense of the intensity and speed of the decision-making teachers perform in every lesson, every day. 

It’s really hard. It’s really challenging. We can help by developing a positive and constructive response when things do not go the way our students, or their parents might hope, rather than reflexively complaining in negative and, unfortunately sometimes, demeaning or undermining ways.

Part of the development of this attitude lies in how the teaching profession is reported on. I encourage you to read a longer piece on this here written by Associate Professor Nicole Mockler in The Conversation. In short, Mockler found that reporting on teaching is fixated on teacher quality, that teacher work is made out to be simple, and that teacher-bashing is routine.

How can we help?  Don’t use received wisdom from the media, and in particular, social media, as the basis for forming opinions about a school or its teachers.

Pay

Teacher surveys and investigations by academics show that teachers do not, typically, rate remuneration highly as a factor that would cause them to enter (or leave) the profession. It is interesting though, that when politicians make suggestions, like the recent one which says teacher training, for example, should be more like that of doctors, they stop short of saying their salaries should be as well. It is certainly true that some teachers are moving to the Independent sector because of the relatively higher rate of pay they can receive in that setting, and who could blame them given house prices and the cost of living?  The movement of staff into the independent sector also relates to the point below on “residualisation.”

“Residualisation”

Chris Bonner and others, have written about the “residualisation” of the public sector for many years. You may wish to visit the Save Our Schools website for more information.

In general terms, this describes systemic structures, in particular, funding models, which have caused a disproportionate amount of lower performing (as well as students with higher, and more complex needs) to be left in the public sector schools. For at least 20 years, we have seen an increasing trend where aspirational parents move their children away from state schools. There is a significant body of research that suggests that this is not only bad for how we develop students, but it is bad for our country. Australia’s education system has one of the lowest scores for equity in the OECD. This is a problem, because it is known that one of the hallmarks of excellent and effective education systems is high equity. 

What does this mean for teacher recruitment and retention? Public sector schools, in general, are trying to attract and retain staff in a system which serves the most challenging, most needy and least high performing students. In short, the hardest teaching there is. 

How do we help? Firstly, let’s recognise that, whilst we all love to cite the Education Act of 1872 (free, secular and compulsory) with pride, only one sector actually does compulsory education, and that’s the State sector. If a student is too naughty, or too academically challenged (or, to use the vernacular of the Independent Sector- they are not “thriving”) where do they often end up? In the government school sector.

We should wear this as a badge of honour. We should be proud of our schools, and the teachers within them who work so hard, and do their very best to make sure every child receives a good education, regardless of the child’s circumstances, capacity or needs. But please, don’t think the other sectors are delivering compulsory education. 

In closing, I ask that we recognise, celebrate and support the amazing work teachers do in in the public sector in general, and of course, at our school. To address the teacher shortage we need to develop a narrative and appreciation that teachers are experts who deserve our respect and who perform some of the most important work in society.

With this acknowledgement, and our support (and hopefully, reductions in work-load) we will have some chance of addressing the current teacher shortage.

Yours sincerely,

Richard Minack

Principal