How to give teachers more time for teaching and fewer tedious administrative tasks
One key move would give Aussie teachers an extra 100 million hours a year and let them focus on their students. But it’s the opposite of what the Productivity Commission wants.
It was encouraging to see the Productivity Commission acknowledge teacher burnout and their growing administrative burden in its latest inquiry.
But the commission’s proposed solutions sound like management consultancy ideas, not solutions, and nothing that addresses what teachers say they need.
The Australian Education Union’s State of our Schools survey found most teachers work well beyond their paid hours every week.
Many want more time for lesson planning and need more professional development to help them teach students with disabilities and additional learning needs.
■ MOST READ: Australia’s top 100 public schools ranked
The Productivity Commission has proposed a central online platform of lesson plans to cut time teachers spend on planning lessons themselves.
But this treats lesson planning as an administrative burden and a task that teachers unnecessarily replicate.
Teachers already draw on shared materials. Their lesson planning time is when they can be creative and determine how they can best teach the curriculum.
Losing meaningful and creative parts from educating while absorbing administration and compliance tasks will sap the joy from teaching and risks deskilling the profession.
We wouldn’t expect chefs in kitchens to work from pre-prepared recipes unless they were running a fast-food franchise.
We cannot expect any wins from teachers working from cookie-cutter lesson plans. Real teaching needs creativity and ability to adapt to the people in front of you.
Instead, investing in dedicated support staff to manage permission forms, school attendance, compliance work and the extra administration needed to accommodate children who have additional learning needs is a far more efficient and effective way to curb burnout.
Reallocating some of the existing administrative workload from teachers to other staff could give educators back between 67 million and 106 million hours per year. They would have time to plan, collaborate and to restore work/life balance.
Most of us can recall teachers who left us with standout classroom memories. Their personal presence sticks with us, well beyond what they taught.
Some found ways to captivate the classroom, some went over and above.
When a year 12 extension English module didn’t run at my school because I was the only student interested, Mr Cleary taught it anyway, in his own time. We’d sit in the library at lunchtime or after school, and it was my best result for the year.
And my year 5 teacher, Mrs Crawford, would tell us Greek mythology stories after lunch.
We’d all beg Mrs Crawford to tell us what happened next – we loved listening to the stories because she loved telling them.
I doubt stories keep classrooms spellbound when the teacher isn’t so enthused.
Both had been teachers for decades by the time I was lucky to have them, and both taught until retirement.
Now, more than 20 years on, I see the difference passionate teachers make for my daughter, who has struggled with school.
And I hope they don’t follow the paths of many teachers today, leaving the job early because they’re burnt out, stressed, and no longer enjoying their work.
What are your memories of great teachers? And do you agree that educators need to be freed from endless admin? Leave a comment below or email us at education@news.com.au
