For the love of teaching, it’s a testing time

“This is my third year of teaching. I began in 2020, right back when Covid started, and last term was the first full term I had ever taught – as in [it was the first] not impacted by remote learning, delayed starts or early holidays in any way,” Vantarakis says. “Crazy, right?”

Teacher shortages have been coming for a while, but recently those working in the profession have started to become increasingly concerned. The State of the Sector report from school workforce research organisation PeopleBench surveyed 469 school leaders, teachers and business advisors last year. It found workforce shortages had moved from respondents’ fifth-most pressing concern to second place. Industry leaders predict that by 2024 it will move to the top spot.

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“Addressing teacher shortages, which are being measured in the tens of thousands, is an urgent priority for the sector. However, concurrently to that, we need to be looking to a sector-wide culture shift that better helps the workforce cope with the demands of the roles themselves,” says Fleur Johnston, CEO of PeopleBench.

Johnston says addressing shortages will only be achieved by addressing the full hire-to-retire lifecycle of the teaching workforce as well as tackling cultural and practical issues that are leaving teachers feeling overworked and exhausted.

“It means addressing the increasing challenges of teacher wellbeing and engaging existing teachers in the redesign of their role to shape jobs of the future and to better reflect changing education delivery – such as hybrid online and in-person learning environments,” she says.

It’s work that Johnston believes is necessary and will pay off for the sector.

“In doing so, we can not only influence the plateauing enrolment rates and declining graduation rates to fix the recruitment stage, we can also slow the more alarming exodus of teachers in the wake of the pandemic in order to address the issue of retention,” she says.

The 2022 survey is currently open for collection and is calling for Australian and New Zealand principals and school teachers to have their say: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/stateofthesector22