The school doorbell rings and the hallways are filled with screams and fights as a massive teenage movement makes its way down a hallway.
“You have people in the assembly. Let’s go,” says the director, Grant, as he walks out the door with a group of older people.
When the last student leaves and the hallways are quiet, Grant turns into a purple-cement concrete block office. Crouched on a desk, its director Scott pours over the time of day.
“It simply came to our notice then [go] with coverage for today? ”Grant asks.
“I just got another sick call,” Scott says. “I’ll have to try to do magic and find someone to cover the first period. But we’re very busy today.”
This NSW regional high school has 12 short teachers this mid-May day, nearly a quarter of its teaching staff.
“Mathematics has been discovered. English is discovered in Year 12,” says Scott. “Year 12 SLR discovered”.
“A lot of those kids also did double math yesterday afternoon without a teacher. So today they’re lost again,” Grant says.
The nightmare that takes place at 9:03 a.m. on the third floor of this high school is occurring to varying degrees in Australia as schools struggle to cope with teacher shortages.
In NSW, rural and remote areas have always struggled to cover their entire teacher assignment. And, in the past, these shortcomings have occasionally been placed in areas of south-west Sydney. But today, schools from Bondi to Broken Hill are struggling to put teachers at the forefront of classes, and professional educators in NSW and across the country say they have never seen anything like it.
The reasons for scarcity and where they feel most in New South Wales are varied. An aging workforce, a drop in the number of graduate teachers and a growing student population are all part of a complex picture.
There is a consensus that not enough has been done to strengthen the position of the profession and that the salary cap in relation to other professions, together with an exhausting workload, make teaching undesirable for students leaving the profession. school. And then there are the effects of the pandemic, which has left an already scarce education system inexorably exposed.
As Scott and Grant look at their school schedule, they realize that there is no one to teach an 8th grade art class that starts in 20 minutes. She will have to be taught by an English teacher who is studying the last year of her teaching career.
“I’ll have to go down quickly and get her lesson for her so she can teach it in 20 minutes,” Scott says.
“We’re putting as many fingers in the holes as we can to block the dam. And eventually it’ll probably overflow. We’re at the breaking point.”
Director Grant says, “People need to know that there’s a real problem and that this isn’t just about sweeping under the rug.”
Take the last resort
On a cool May morning two weeks earlier, a sea of angry public school teachers wearing red T-shirts is being built in Hyde Park, Sydney. “No teachers, no future!” they sing as they raise banners with the names of their schools: Seaforth, Dapto, Cronulla, Braidwood Central School, ready to roll down Macquarie Street to NSW Parliament.
Business negotiations between the NSW Teachers Federation and the government collapsed in December last year, and now teachers have taken to the streets.
Their demands include a significant response to the shortage, a wage increase of more than 2.5% maximum and a reduction in the workload. A 2021 report from the Australian Institute for Education and School Leadership says more than half of the state’s full-time teaching staff worked an average of 60 hours a week, while only paid between 36 and 40 hours.
This is only the second time that teachers have gone on strike in a decade.
Many teachers are here for what they see in their workplace and are concerned about their students.
“We’re failing these kids right now, and that’s horrible,” says Sarah, a teacher and union delegate in south-west Sydney who has asked us to change her name, before the rally.
“Every time they go without a teacher, they feel less valued. Then they misbehave, because they worry about you not staying. The more they put you to the test, the more [staff] to leave”.
At the rally, he introduces his partner, Lara, who is in charge of his school’s schedule. Lara also asks to use a different name: public school teachers need permission before talking to the media.
But Lara can’t contain herself.
“We have art teachers who teach math. We have people who have no training or experience in special education who take our most disadvantaged classes.”
Lara says she sees the impact as a result of the increase in truancy.
“If you have a casual day-to-day and no teacher with clear expectations who knows who you are,” he says, “you’ll go to jig class.”
Sarah says there is a constant juggling between the needs of HSC students and the most vulnerable children in her school, and often the most vulnerable get lost. She is to blame for not being able to do more.
“A good education is a human right and we cannot give it away at the moment.”
Not just the regions
At a school in the suburbs of Sydney, English teacher and treasurer of the local union branch Joel Wallington tells me how his school had 31 combined classes or under a minimum supervision about a week after the demonstration.
About 20 of these classes were students of 12.
Joel says he cared for 65 students in the library that day.
“The word right now is that if you’re out and you have old people, then they go to the library, they don’t cover them.”
He says four teachers left this week. “We’re losing even some of the most dedicated people and new people, who have come in and just said ‘No, that’s too much.'”
Shortly afterwards, Joel sent me a desperate request on Facebook from another school in South West Sydney for more teachers to cover the minimum supervision classes: “No lesson planning, no lesson preparation, you just have to be attentive “.
The NSW Department of Education’s internal board has been warning for years about a shortage in certain subject areas. In 2020, internal documents warned in the next five years, NSW would “run out of teachers” to match student enrollments and replace those who retire.
Last year’s department figures showed that public schools dropped more than 1,100 full-time permanent teachers in October.
As it seems minimal supervision
One day when Grant’s regional school doesn’t have a dozen teachers, mostly COVID patients, he teaches me a classroom where there is a 12-year-old English class talking about their weekends. Laptops open quickly as Director Grant pokes his head in the door.
“Do you have a teacher today?” Grant asks. “No, we never have teachers,” one student replies.
Grant explains that older students are among the first to be subjected to minimal supervision, because they can be left unsupervised safely where younger children cannot.
When he leaves the room, Grant reflects that he taught the student who called 8th.
“A lovely child and you can only see that she is detached from these lessons,” she says.
“It was like, ‘No, we don’t even have a teacher, nobody cares about us.’ That kind of attitude, which is not fair, because we care.
Grant says only five to 10 percent of students are motivated enough to pursue self-directed studies.
Teachers say they are seeing an increase in behavior problems as a result of reduced supervision. (ABC RN: Safdar Ahmed)
Cohen is 11 at Grant School and hopes to study radiology or physiotherapy after graduating.
Some weeks, Cohen says, some weeks will have a couple of days in a row in which he spends multiple periods without a teacher.
His description of the minimal supervision classes sounds like a kind of glorified kangaroo, where a teacher explains the work he is expected to do in class and then leaves.
“You really have no one to ask [questions], so pull out the phone to search for it. Then, once you plug in your phone, open your Instagram, “says Cohen.
“You get carried away, because there’s no teacher.”
Cohen says his classmates sometimes play American basketball games online while the teacher isn’t. Then, when the teacher returns five minutes before the end of the lesson to ask where his work is, he has not done so.
He says he is to blame for his lack of motivation. Missing classes are starting to affect her performance, she says, so now her mother is trying to fill in the gaps at home.
“We took an exam a couple of weeks ago … and I’m usually pretty good at math, but I had no idea what was going on.”
Cohen says that if he doesn’t get enough grades to get into radiology or physical therapy, he will stay in the city and hopes his father will help him find a job.
“I guess from there he becomes who you know,” he says.
“This is not sustainable”
The story of how he got so bad is partly the story of Simon’s career. He is a teacher at Grant’s school and has asked us to change his name.
When Simon began teaching in the early 2000’s, the shortage of teachers was concentrated mainly in the regions. His first three years of teaching were in a rural school, and he remembers them fondly.
Despite a few overtime hours, the workload was manageable. But he says that around 2012, this began to change as new policies and curricula saw an increase in administrative work, which in 2014 had become unbearable.
“I remember having a conversation with my wife at the time, and I was very frustrated because I had basically spent [the] all week long enough late at night and then on the weekend … for a good while … and I remember saying, “That’s not sustainable.”
When COVID arrived, teachers who were already lying down had to adapt their lessons and involve students and their parents in new learning styles.
When the children returned to class, the teachers found themselves covering their sick classmates and juggling a number of student welfare issues. Burnout pushed some teachers to leave or retire early.
At the end of 2020, Simon feared that his school would not be able to fill his …