Managing students’ medication, dealing with school refusers and writing plans to address difficult behaviour are among the biggest drains on teacher time, a report auditing administrative tasks in the public education system has found.
But the long-awaited audit failed to identify any bureaucratic tasks which should be axed, despite NSW Labor promising before the last state election to save five hours of teachers’ time each week.
The long-awaited audit did not identify any bureaucratic requirements which should be axed.Credit: Istock
The audit identified 105 tasks with processes considered “frustrating, painful, cumbersome, or overly complex” by teachers who attended workshops.
“The consistent reporting of increasing and sustained workload pressures on teachers is a clear signal that more needs to be done to support teachers to keep pace with schools’ contemporary roles and responsibilities,” the report concluded.
Research from the Grattan Institute has previously found 92 per cent of Australian teachers say they “always” or “frequently” do not have time for effective teaching, while principals say bureaucratic requirements are a barrier to reducing workload.
A selection of the 105 high workload tasks identified by teachers
- Non-attendance and school refusal
- Medication management
- Late arrivals and early departures
- Community facility hire and use
- Check-in and other department-developed assessments
- Behaviour support plans
- Individual NDIS student support
- Unit and lesson planning
Audit of teaches’ administrative tasks final report (December 2024)
Reducing teachers’ administrative burden was one of Premier Chris Minns’ key promises at the 2023 state election.
“We will go line by line over every piece of admin that teachers are required to do and make sure that time will instead be spent on improving student outcomes,” Minns said at the time.
Since Labor came to office, dense Department of Education policies have been rewritten and simplified, teachers have been granted access to an artificial intelligence robot to navigate department policies, and accreditation requirements have been overhauled.
NSW Secondary Principals’ Council president Denise Lofts said rethinking some teacher jobs, such as data collection requirements, could go some way towards freeing up time for teaching.
“Things that support the wellbeing and safety of students can’t be compromised,” she said.
Denise Lofts said growing data requirements were often unnecessary.
“But if you think about anaphylaxis plans, ADHD meds and asthma medication – they are about individual care of students. While this is important, it is actually becoming a massive burden. Between medication and behaviour plans, there seems to be no room for teaching.”
Opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Mitchell said the government had made zero progress on its commitment to reduce every public school teacher’s administrative burden by five hours.
“After almost two years in government, all they have managed to achieve is a departmental audit which doesn’t identify a single task to be removed for classroom teachers, nor does it identify any metrics to be used to measure any time ‘saved’ for teachers,” she said.
Acting Education Minister John Graham said the audit was a “first step” and the government was on track to deliver the five-hour time saving.
“As the report notes, not once in 12 years did the former Liberal-National government bother to find out what tasks our hard-working teachers undertake,” he said.
“The audit of teachers’ tasks is the first step by identifying – for the first time – what teachers actually do, so we can work out how to streamline or reduce certain tasks and enable teachers to focus on the classroom. This work is ongoing.”
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