By Mihajla Gavin, Meghan Stacey, Susan McGrath-Champ, Rachel Wilson and Scott Fitzgerald
Teacher workload has come to be understood as a significant problem in Australia, contributing to stress, burnout and workforce attrition. Over the last decade, there has been a wealth of empirical research which has carefully documented how teacher workload and work intensity are impacting the profession.
But perhaps surprisingly, there is little research discussing ways to ‘fix’ this problem. We have few comprehensive insights on how to tackle workload, and scarce empirical research from the voice of teachers on what is needed.
Of what has been published in research and government policies to date, the ways forward to deal with the problem seem highly varied and sometimes even contradictory. In New South Wales, policies like the Quality Time Program have been pitched as solutions to alleviate the administrative burdens on teachers, alongside hiring more staff to manage school administration, and developing online tools and resources that promise to deliver quicker lesson plans for teachers. Other proposals have called for decreasing class sizes or reducing the size of the school curriculum.
In our new research recently published in The Australian Educational Researcher, we were interested to understand teachers’ views on how to manage workload and what teachers articulated as most necessary to manage their workload. Our secondary-analysis study drew from union-commissioned survey data of more than 50,000 teachers and school leaders across all Australian states, approximately one-quarter of teachers in Australia’s public schools. These surveys, which were carried out across six states between 2016 and 2022, all focused on teacher workload and ways to manage workload.
Teachers told us what they need to manage workload
In our analysis we ranked the ‘top 5’ strategies reported by teachers to better manage their workload across each state.
From this, we found three strong, overarching themes:
(1) increased time and support, primarily through reduced face-to-face teaching time
(2) increased specialised teacher support for students with special needs, and
(3) greater consultation, due-diligence and sensitive timing for introducing changes in schools.
At the heart of the research findings is a strong imperative for teachers to retain a focus on the core work of teaching and learning. Not having enough quality time to do this important work is a concern. Teachers also need the right kind of support to help them. This does not mean ‘outsourcing’ work to someone else, but considering minimising the burden of administrative loads or excessive policy changes which impact this quality time.
The NSW Teachers’ Federation’s new campaign seeking additional weekly release time for teachers mirrors these findings. In a recent survey by the union, teacher members said they didn’t have enough time to address student wellbeing matters or collaborate with colleagues. Teachers also needed more quality time for lesson planning.
While our study data focused on strategies that were put to teachers in a survey, informed by unions, we were struck by what our findings said particularly compared to the discourse on teacher wellbeing.
Teachers are not asking for ‘wellbeing’ interventions
During our analysis, we noticed a pattern related to the contemporary discourse on teacher wellbeing. When we only look at the outcomes of job demands, like stress or burnout, there is a tendency to try and focus on ‘solving’ these negative outcomes, rather than looking at the job demands themselves, like workload.
This is problematic because it individualises the teacher workload problem and fails to consider what is causing the burden of certain job demands, like workload, in the first place.
Our paper used a multi-level job demand-resources model of wellbeing to interrogate this further. While some research on teacher wellbeing takes a multi-level approach, usually this is only at the individual or school level, excluding the broader sectoral context.
Discourse on teacher wellbeing has tended to focus on how job demands, like workload, can be managed at the individual teacher level through coping or resilience. Wellbeing interventions commonly target the stress or burnout arising from job demands, and try to provide workers with resources to ‘cope’, like exercising more, tips to better balance work and life, or advice to proactively ‘job craft’.
Such approaches are also problematic because they individualise both the problem and the solution, overlooking complex sources of workload and work intensity, including the institutional pressures which generate such job demands.
System-level solutions are needed to tackle workload
Solutions to the current teacher workload problem needed to be grounded in system-level strategies which are informed directly by teacher voice.
Current ‘wellbeing’ strategies that emphasise individual coping, resilience and stress management are very limited when discussing a system-wide issue like workload.
Importantly, this national study makes clear what teachers need to better manage their workload: increased time and quality support to better prepare for teaching and learning, assistance with managing complex student needs, and more sensitive approaches to change management in schools.
From left to right: Mihajla Gavin is Senior Lecturer in the Business School at the University of Technology Sydney. With expertise in employment relations, Mihajla’s research analyses teachers’ work and employment and union-led strategies to drive change in the school education sector. Meghan Stacey is Associate Professor and ARC DECRA Fellowin the UNSW School of Education. Her current research focuses on analysing policy responses to teacher workload across Australian education systems. Susan McGrath-Champ is Professor of Work and Employment Relations (Honorary) at the University of Sydney. Susan co-leads an international program of research on schools as workplaces focusing on teachers’ conditions of work. Rachel Wilson is Professor of Social Impact and an internationally recognised expert in education at the University of Technology Sydney. She has a long track record of diverse social science research looking at education, work, health, management, leadership, and broader human development. Scott Fitzgerald is an associate professor in the School of Management at Curtin Business School, Curtin University in Western Australia, specialising in employment relations, industrial relations, and the political economy of the education sector.
This article was originally published on EduResearch Matters. Read the original article.
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