By Noel Towell and Angus Delaney
Most Victorian public school teachers have given up on public education as a job for life, saying they are overworked, underpaid and facing rising levels of aggression in classrooms and from parents, a major new piece of academic research reveals.
A statewide survey of 8000 teachers, principals and school support workers by Monash University found that just three-in-10 educators envisaged staying in the public school system until retirement, with 40 per cent already considering leaving.
Victoria Road Primary School principal Lisa Branch.Credit: Jason South
The research, led by Professor Fiona Longmuir, of Monash’s Faculty of Education, found excessive workloads and poor pay topped the list of reasons for those eyeing an exit, followed by a lack of respect in the community for the profession.
Student violence, challenging behaviour and even the poor conduct of parents were also widely cited among factors most likely to push them out of the profession. Nearly two-thirds cited poor student behaviour as a key reason, while a third of those nominated the conduct of parents.
“I was never employed to work with violent students and that is what my job is turning into,” one unnamed respondent told the Monash researchers.
The teachers’ union said the research showed improvements to pay and conditions were vital if standards were to be maintained.
Longmuir and her team made a number of recommendations to encourage teachers and principals to stay in their jobs, including better wages, more flexibility on time off, reducing the administrative burden and providing more support.
Victoria Road Primary School principal Lisa Branch said while instances of violence and aggression from students were uncommon at the Lilydale school, they were on the rise across the system.
“We’re seeing more of it because there’s distress in the community,” she said.
“There’s family violence; children are seeing things they shouldn’t be seeing; they’re online; they’re witnessing things that aren’t for the eyes of children, and that’s distressing.
“We see that play out in aggression and violence for a number of different reasons [and] it’s hard for people to manage that [and] it’s upsetting to work in it.”
Parents acting aggressively was also becoming more common.
“What that looks like, is parents being disrespectful or underplaying what it is that we’re doing here at school,” Branch said.
“That can end up in some aggression in some cases, and that’s happening across the state, across the country.
“We’re not treated with the respect that we should be treated with.”
The Monash researchers noted that those most likely to leave the profession were in the vital mid-career cohort – teachers with between six and 20 years classroom experience.
That would have huge implications for future leadership, with good quality principals already in short supply, they found.
“This concern for the future of leadership in Victorian schools is pressing,” they wrote in the report.
Most of Victoria’s 52,000 government school teachers in 2022 backed a new four-year workplace deal, accepting a 2 per cent annual pay rise and a reduction of 1.5 hours of face-to-face teaching time each week. The state government also agreed to hire an additional 1900 teachers.
But respondents to the Monash survey said they were still doing an average of 12.5 hours of unpaid work each week – a key factor in job dissatisfaction.
School leaders reported doing 17.5 additional hours per week
Branch, who oversees more than 200 students in Melbourne’s outer-east school, said she clocked up the hours.
“If you didn’t make yourself switch off, you could keep yourself busy 24 hours a day with all the work that we have to do,” she said.
Added that to complaints about low-pay, underfunding, a lack of respect and too much unnecessary administration work and “people can only do that for so long before they burn out”, she said.
Australian Education Union Victorian branch president Meredith Peace said the state government was to blame for the crisis.
“Without significant and urgent action to retain current staff, the teacher workforce shortage crisis impacting Victorian public schools will get worse,” Peace said.
“The state Labor government has not done enough to fix the teacher shortage crisis and have done nothing new to fix the issue in over 12 months. This new research is a wake-up call for Education Minister [Ben] Carroll and the premier.”
The state government did not respond to questions from The Age on Thursday.
In May, Carroll commissioned a wide-ranging review into teacher, support staff and principals’ workloads and said the Labor government had already spent $67 million trying to reduce the administrative burden on educators in the state system.
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