The school bell rings and the halls fill with yelling and scuffling as a mass movement of teenagers makes its way along a corridor.
“You’ve got assembly folks. Let’s go,” says the principal, Grant, as he ushers a group of senior stragglers out the door.
When the last student is gone and the halls are quiet, Grant turns into a lilac-coloured cinder block office. Hunched over a desk, his head teacher Scott pores over the day’s timetable.
“How did we [go] with cover for today?” asks Grant.
“I’ve just had another one call in sick,” says Scott. “I’m going to have to try and pull some magic and find someone to cover period one.”
“But we’re looking extremely busy today.”
This regional NSW high school is 12 teachers short on this mid May day — almost a quarter of its teaching staff.
“Maths is uncovered. Year 12 English is uncovered,” says Scott. “Year 12 SLR is uncovered.”
“A lot of those kids had double maths yesterday afternoon too without a teacher. So they missed out again today,” says Grant.
The timetabling nightmare unfolding at 9:03am on the third floor of this high school is occurring in varying degrees across Australia as schools struggle to come to terms with crippling teacher shortages.
Teaching shortages in rural NSW ongoing
In NSW, rural and remote areas have always struggled to fill their full allocation of teachers. And, in the past, these shortages have occasionally crept into patches of south-west Sydney.
But today, schools from Bondi to Broken Hill are struggling to put teachers in front of classes, and career educators in NSW and across the country say they’ve never seen anything like it.
The reasons for shortages and where they are felt most in New South Wales are varied. An older workforce, a drop in graduate teacher numbers, and a growing student population form part of a complex picture.
There’s consensus that not enough has been done to bolster the standing of the profession, and that the pay cap relative to other professions coupled with a back-breaking workload make teaching undesirable to school-leavers. And then, there’s the effects of the pandemic, which has left an already-lean education system hopelessly exposed.
As Scott and Grant stare at their school’s timetable, they realise there’s no one to teach a Year 8 art class that starts in 20 minutes. It will have to go to an English teacher who is in her last year of a teaching degree.
“I’ll have to quickly duck down and get her lesson for her so that she can teach that in 20 minutes time,” says Scott.
“We’re putting as many fingers in holes to block the dam as we can. And eventually, it’s probably gonna overflow. We are at the breaking point.”
Principal Grant says: “People need to know that there is a real issue and this is not something just to be swept under the carpet.”
Strike the last resort
On a cool May morning two weeks earlier, a sea of angry public school teachers in red T-shirts builds in Hyde Park, Sydney. “No teachers, no future!” they chant as they raise banners with their schools’ names — Seaforth, Dapto, Cronulla, Braidwood Central School — ready to roll down Macquarie Street to NSW Parliament House.
Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Major disruptions as teachers and public transport workers organise seperate strikes.(ABC News)
Enterprise bargaining between the NSW Teachers Federation and government collapsed in December last year, and now, teachers have taken to the streets.
Their demands include a meaningful response to the shortages, a pay rise greater than the capped 2.5 per cent, and a reduction in workload. A 2021 report by Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership says that more than half of the state’s full time teaching staff work reported working on average 60-hours per week, while only being paid for 36-40 hours.
It’s only the second time teachers have gone on strike in a decade.
Many teachers are here because of what they see in their workplace and they’re worried about their students.
“We’re failing these kids at the moment, and that’s horrible,” Sarah, a teacher and union delegate from south-west Sydney who has asked us to change her name, says before the rally.
“Every period they have without a teacher, they feel less valued. Then they misbehave, because they get worried you’re not going to stick around. The more they test you, the more [staff] leave.”
Thousands of teachers and their supporters have gathered at Sydney’s Hyde Park to protest for better wages and conditions. (ABC News: Harriet Tatham)
At the rally, she introduces her colleague, Lara, who is responsible for timetabling at their school. Lara asks to use a different name also — public school teachers need permission before speaking to the media.
But Lara can’t contain herself.
“We’ve got art teachers teaching maths. We’ve got people that aren’t trained or experienced in special education taking our most disadvantaged classes.”
Lara says she sees the impact playing out through increased truancy.
“If you are having day to day casuals and no set teacher with clear expectations who knows who you are,” she says, “you’re going to jig class.”
Sarah says there’s a constant juggle between the needs of HSC students and her school’s most vulnerable kids, and often, the most vulnerable are missing out. She’s racked with guilt that she can’t do more.
“A good education is a human right and we can’t give it to them at the moment.”
Not just in the regions
At a school in outer suburban Sydney, English teacher and local union branch treasurer Joel Wallington tells me how his school had 31 classes combined or under minimal supervision about a week after the rally.
Around 20 of those classes were year 12 students.
Joel says he looked after 65 students in the library that day.
“The word at the moment is if you’re away and you have seniors, then they’re going to the library, they’re not getting covered.”
He says four teachers quit that week. “We’re losing some of even the most dedicated people, and the new people, who have come in and just gone ‘No, this is too much’.”
Soon after, Joel sent me a desperate Facebook plea from another school in south-west Sydney for more teachers to cover minimal supervision classes: “No lesson planning, no lesson prep, just keep an eye on them.”
The NSW Department of Education’s own internal advice has been warning about a shortage in certain subject areas for years. In 2020, internal documents warned in the next five years, NSW would “run out of teachers” to match student enrolments and replace those retiring.
Department figures from last year showed public schools were down over 1,100 permanent full-time classroom teachers in October.
What minimal supervision looks like
On a day where Grant’s regional school is short a dozen teachers — most sick with COVID — he shows me to a classroom, where a year 12 English class sits discussing their weekends. Laptops are hurriedly opened as Principal Grant sticks his head in the door.
“You guys got a teacher today?” asks Grant. “No, we never have teachers,” a student shoots back.
Teachers say they’re seeing an increase in behavioural issues as a result of reduced supervision.(ABC RN: Safdar Ahmed)
Grant explains that senior students are among the first to be put under minimal supervision, because they can be safely left unsupervised where younger children can’t.
As he leaves the room, Grant reflects that he taught the student who yelled out in year 8.
“A lovely kid and you can just see that she’s disengaged in those lessons,” he says.
“It was like, ‘No, we haven’t even got a teacher, no one cares about us’. That kind of attitude, which isn’t fair, because we do care. Just wish we could do more.”
Grant says that only around five to 10 per cent of students are highly motivated enough to do self-directed study.
Cohen is in year 11 at Grant’s school, and hopes to study radiology or physiotherapy after graduating.
Some weeks, Cohen says some weeks he’ll have a couple of days in a row where he has multiple periods without a teacher.
His description of minimal supervision classes sounds like a kind of glorified babysitting, where a teacher explains the work the class is expected to do, then leaves.
“You don’t really have anyone to ask [questions], so you pull out your phone to search it up. Then once you get on your phone, you open up your Instagram,” says Cohen.
“You get a bit carried away, because there’s no teacher there.”
Cohen says his classmates sometimes stream American basketball games online while the teacher’s away. Then, when the teacher returns five minutes before the end of lesson to ask where their work is, they haven’t done it.
He says he blames himself for his lack of motivation. The missed classes are starting to affect his performance, he says, so his mother is now trying to fill in the gaps at home.
“We had a test a couple of weeks back… and I’m normally pretty good at maths, but I had no idea what was going on.”
Cohen says if he doesn’t get enough marks to get into radiology or physiotherapy, he’ll stay in town and hopes his father can help him find a trade.
“I guess it becomes who you know, from there,” he says.
‘This isn’t sustainable’
The story of how it got this bad is in part the story of Simon’s career. He’s a teacher at Grant’s school, and has asked us to change his name.
When Simon started teaching in the early 2000s, teacher shortages were mostly concentrated in the regions. His first three years of teaching were at a rural school, and he remembers them fondly.
Despite a bit of overtime, the workload was manageable. But he says that around 2012, that started to change as new policies and syllabi saw the admin work increase, which by 2014, had become unbearable.
“I remember having a conversation with my wife, at the time, and I was very frustrated because I’d spent basically [the] whole week quite late at night and then the weekend… for quite a while… and I remember saying, ‘This is not sustainable’.”
When COVID arrived, already stretched…