2023 Workforce Profile Report finds teachers leave profession after 11 years

Most teachers are spending little more than a decade in the profession before leaving, the 2023 Workforce Profile Report has revealed.

Teachers are leaving their jobs earlier than ever, with new figures showing the median time they are spending at a public school has dropped to just under 11 years.

Once regarded as a “job for life”, teachers are now outranked by police in terms of longevity — with the average cop in NSW staying more than 12 years in the job.

Poor pay, increasing workloads and a loss of respect for the profession have been blamed for the trend, along with more challenging students and parents.

The figures are contained in the latest NSW government 2023 Workforce Profile Report, which gives a detailed snapshot on the health of the public sector.

The report said the NSW public sector full-time workforce increased by 4.7 per cent last year, the “largest recorded growth in the workforce since the workforce profile commenced in 1999”.

Teaching has become much more complex over the years. Picture: iStock

The number of teachers hired also rose by more than 800 to 71,787, while police numbers dropped by 649 to 20,087.

However, the length of time teachers stayed in the job has declined, dropping 2.5 years from 2014.

NSW Secondary Principals’ Council president Craig Petersen, who has been in the sector for 36 years, agreed that more younger staff were no longer seeing teaching as a “job for life”.

Changes to what was a generous superannuation scheme for teachers in the 1990s had created less of a financial incentive for people to stay on, while the job itself had become more demanding.

Teachers were also no longer as trusted and respected as they once were, facing more questions from the media, politicians and parents, he said.

“A lot of people go into the profession for altruistic reasons, wanting to make a difference, but the job has become incredibly harder and much more complex — it is immeasurably more complex now,” Mr Petersen said.

NSW Secondary Principals’ Council president Craig Petersen

“Workload is a part of it, but it is also the status of the profession.

“We’ve gone from being a profession that was trusted and respected to not so much any more.

“Whereas parents would back in the teacher, the system would back in the teacher, now we’re more likely to be questioned.

“We’ve also got a more complex community. There are more kids that are being diagnosed with mental health or a disability.

“Then you have the increased demands around accountability with 48-49 hours of mandatory training.

“Reports are now more detailed. We are talking hours for one class report. This is unseen work and in a secondary school, you’d be lucky to get one lesson off a day.”

Mr Petersen said he believed the pandemic had also played a role in teachers leaving, especially when they saw peers in other jobs working from home.

As for where teachers went, he said many took up jobs in a related field, such as a group of PE teachers from Western Sydney who started up a business offering their services to schools in need of extra help.

Blaming the former Coalition government for damaging the teaching profession, Education and Early Learning Minister Prue Car said the government was working to make it a job for life once again.

“We have delivered the biggest pay rise for teachers in three decades and are working hard to reduce the time they have to spend on administration to allow them to focus on what they do best: teaching,” she said.

“This government knows that the most important factor in a child’s education is having a teacher in front of them.

“Retaining teachers and attracting new recruits to the profession remains a key focus for our government.”

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