“Once you get used to the 50 or 55-hour work week, and adjust your life around it, it gets better”, Aran explains. “It’s about an extra two or three hours each night from Monday to Thursday, and then an extra day on the weekend.” “Extra”, here, is a euphemism for unpaid overtime.
We’re sitting across from each other at a table in the 30-person staffroom of the public secondary school in Melbourne’s north where we are both teaching. Aran’s desk faces the car park, now repurposed as a construction site for new portable buildings needed to house the school’s 2,000 students.
The students have gone home, and this is a rare unstructured moment in a day otherwise dictated by bells and bureaucrats. “You will only be paid for 38 hours per week for a job that is at least 50”, Aran continues.
Betty, who works in another part of the sprawling school complex, suddenly appears before us. She hovers, holding a thick stack of loose-leaf paper and exhibiting the quiet mania common to workers expected to manage the unmanageable.
Betty clearly needs to interrupt us. But listening to our conversation, she chimes in with her own advice. “In this job it helps”, she says, “to have insomnia. I usually do those extra hours from 11pm to 1am each night, when my kids are sleeping”.
At that time, I was studying to earn a teaching qualification while teaching at the same time—except for a third less pay. The government introduced this program for one reason: there are simply not enough teachers in schools.
An international survey of teaching practices commissioned by the OECD in 2024 found that 58 percent of Australian principals report teacher shortages in their schools. This is more than double the OECD average, and the shortage compounds in schools supporting poor and disadvantaged students.
Of the teachers who are currently working in schools, most want to leave. Research conducted by Monash University in partnership with the Australian Education Union in 2024 confirmed that just three in ten teachers intend to stay in the profession until retirement, with excessive workloads (83 percent) and poor salary (60 percent) the primary reasons for wanting to leave. Mid-career teachers were the most likely to be considering leaving—teachers like Betty and Aran with decades of experience.
The “excessive workload” driving teacher attrition rates does not reveal itself gradually. It slaps you in the face from day one, which starts long before your paid hours do. You arrive early to print materials for your classes, correct assignments, finish planning lessons and get whatever other work done you need to, all of which is impossible once the bells start ringing.
From about 9am to 3pm, you teach for four to five hours. This usually means interacting with up to six different classes and as many as 150 students, each with their own unique learning needs. These have to be accommodated into your lesson designs and teaching strategies—along with the curricula for the various classes—and all this has to be done well before you arrive in the classroom.
During teaching hours, you play parent, social worker, IT technician, judge, entertainer and—if you’re lucky—educator to around 25 young people at a time. You careen back and forth between lessons that “include moments of genuine fulfilment”, as one self-exiled teacher puts it, and others that are “dreadful, even violent, leaving you anxious and wondering how you’ll go back the next day”.
In your breaks, you are often expected to undertake additional supervision duties in the schoolyard or have to complete administrative work arising from the day’s classes, like documenting challenging student behaviour and how you dealt with it. Then, when students finally leave, meetings start.
Within this normalised daily frenzy, the core work of your job—planning lessons to support students’ varied needs in the classroom, preparing teaching resources and providing feedback on student work—is basically unpaid and mainly done from home. It is little wonder, then, that full-time teachers on average report doing 12.5 hours of unpaid extra work each week. This is the equivalent of working 6.5 days a week.
It is also little surprise that 90 percent of Australian teachers report experiences of moderate to severe stress, and more than 60 percent report symptoms of moderate to severe anxiety and depression, according to a recent, comprehensive survey of teacher mental health and workplace stress conducted by UNSW. These levels are more than double the population-wide average.
Without a significant overhaul of working conditions, teachers feel they have little choice but to leave. “I am working on an escape plan” is how one teacher put it to Monash researchers who published a report on the profession in 2022.
Unbearable conditions not only drive teachers out of the profession but also make it difficult to attract people, compounding the already unmanageable workload for those who remain. This vicious circle quietly annihilates an important social right: that of education for all, not just the wealthy.
This situation is by design. At both a federal and state level, Labor and Liberal governments have for decades starved public schools of resources, driven teachers to breaking point and, with this, incentivised families to enrol their kids in private schools. Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released this year shows that the overall percent of students enrolled in public schools is at a record low, with private school enrolments growing at six times the rate of government schools.
Trevor Cobbold, convener of the organisation Save Our Schools, told the Guardian that the biggest factor driving the shift towards private schools is the funding gap. “Public schools”, he noted, simply “have far fewer human and material resources than over-funded private schools”. In this deteriorating situation, families with the economic means to do so are more likely to turn away from public schools, leading them to become understaffed and overworked ghettos for the most disadvantaged sections of society and most burnt-out teachers.
Turning the tide on structural inequality in the education system won’t be easy. But Victorian teachers, who are set to strike on 24 March for better pay and conditions, provide some hope. Their response is not an individual “escape,” but a collective fight back that points the finger clearly at those responsible for the disastrous state of public schools today.
Maria Dabbas is a member of the Australian Education Union.
