Younger Teachers 'Unsure' of Future in Profession

Younger teachers are at most risk of leaving profession, citing workload and wellbeing as leading factors towards leaving the sector.

The profession leans on its young, a lower proportion of early career teachers (48%) were employed in an ongoing capacity, with higher proportions on short fixed-term (24%) or casual (19%) contracts.

While teachers with 'alternative registration to teach' make up a small proportion of the workforce overall, they play an important role in hard-to-staff and remote schools.

The majority of experienced teachers were on ongoing contracts and the gender balance remains heavily female with 78% of teachers being women.

Full time school teachers report having to work an average of 50 hours per week during school term, over a third of teachers and leaders are unsure if they will remain in the profession until retirement.

Experts say more effort is needed to increase teacher satisfaction to retain educators in the sector, such as reduced workload and administrative burden, as well as greater autonomy for teachers.

The findings are from AITSL's National Trends Teacher Workforce report and Associate Professor Joel Windle University of South Australia says that, "Despite teacher shortages being at crisis point, this report shows that working conditions have changed little over the past five years.

"Greater reform efforts are needed to attract, support and retain a high-quality teaching workforce. Teachers are most dissatisfied with tasks that are imposed from above and which appear to have little meaning beyond meeting administrative requirements.

"The report shows that the time spent on administrative tasks has not decreased for most teachers. In fact, for some categories of teacher, time spent on administration has increased. More is needed to reduce this burden."

Workload remains the primary push factor to leave. However, school systems also need to pay greater attention to loss of autonomy.

"Teachers enjoy face-to-face teaching and building positive relationships with students. Centralised mandates to follow a narrow set of teaching methods, often on the basis of a fragile evidence base, undermine teachers' ability to be responsive to their own students.

"Ultimately, top-down recipes undermine and underestimate teacher professionalism.”