Why are so many teachers quitting the classroom? | 60 Minutes Australia

at a time when they're needed more than ever teachers are instead deserting the profession in fact there are now so many of them throwing away their chalk and walking out of the classroom there are a few replacements to fill the void they say the joy has been sucked out of the job and they've had enough of being underpaid and overworked the lack of teachers has become such a serious crisis in schools around the country students are suffering and that's a significant failure for australia's future like obviously give me one that's easy one foot here try to go like that and then and then for 14 years emily bruin loved being known as ms bryan an english teacher who could have come straight from central casting she taught hundreds and probably thousands of victorian high school students she's actually doing okay but then six months ago she suddenly quit fed up not with the kids but the sister when i thought about having to go back into the classroom again this year i was just like i can't do it i'm done i'm i'm toast when a school loses a teacher as committed as emily it's proof something doesn't add up i haven't looked back i haven't looked back one bit i feel like i have more energy um for my own children and for my own life my own life you're not doing much to sell the teaching profession [Laughter] look teaching is a great profession but it asks a lot of you i know lots of fantastic teachers that are feeling the same way just disengaged and undervalued [Music] and like emily so many of them are leaving or threatening to leave the stampede of disenchanted australian educators is causing serious chaos in the classroom we're here because we can't accept the crippling teacher shortages costing our kids opportunities to learn and more important costing them their future [Music] across australia children are going to school some of them go to private schools but most of them go to free state government schools explaining why there's such a shortage of teachers seems to be a simple lesson modern classrooms are nothing like the places of chalk and talk they once were teaching in 2022 is vastly different is much more complex so teachers are finding this tension between doing their work well and teaching their students well and doing what their students deserve their needs deserve to be met but at the same time schools are stuck in a prehistoric structure almost like it was stuck in the 1950s alice leong is a teacher who's sticking at it she has no plans to quit but she is exhausted there's a lot of things that are being added on to teachers work but not a lot is being taken away so essentially we're asking for teachers to do more and more with less resources and i think that's where a lot of teachers are finding that they're burning out the clue is he watched the green clouds gather in the distance as a teachers federation representative alice has heard too many tales of woe recently but her own experience at the school in sydney where she teaches sums up the staffing crisis as well as the absurdity of not having a solution to fix it there was one lesson that i taught four classes combined so i had my own chemistry class there was a senior studies class there was an italian beginner's class and the legal studies class that i just had merged because there was no teachers for the other three classes so you were teaching four four separately i was about 80 alone yeah 80 people um in the library you've got an italian class with a teacher who doesn't speak italian or you just have no teacher how can we allow this to happen how kind of an impact is this having on the students they're not learning yeah so if when you're in a merge class and you're with three other classes you're not really learning effectively and it's not a one-off so it's not like oh once a year this happened um it's ongoing it's frequent it is regular and it's failing our students teachers working conditions are our students learning conditions and we can't separate those two being a teacher used to be so much more rewarding when emily bruin first stepped into the classroom she never wanted to leave it i think i went into teaching thinking i could make a difference often you'd start with kids in year seven and then you'd see them grow throughout the years that they're at high school and change and and blossom but as time went on the demands of the profession grew for emily the pressure peaked just as the pandemic hit in melbourne schools were forced to navigate through one of the world's longest series of lockdowns it tested teachers and students alike the time to reflect during coverage about the fact that teaching so inflexible that it was becoming very tiring and that yeah i just wasn't getting a lot of joy out of it of course it's not only teachers working longer and harder these days many jobs demand it but the perception she and her former colleagues had it easy also contributed to emily wanting to get out a lot of people out there go what do teachers have to complain about yeah yeah 12 weeks leave they can clock off at 3 30. you know they've got a good work life balance yeah what have they possibly got to complain about yeah yeah i think it looks like that from the outside but the reality is that um you know you're getting there quite early in the morning um often you're not clocking off at 3 30. being in the classroom is one thing but behind the scenes you are spending hours working with other teachers developing curriculum planning um going to meetings you just have to be all over everything [Music] the role of a teacher these days john is all encompassing isn't it yeah it's become infinite which is a challenge for a teacher john marsden is best known as a prolific and acclaimed author of children's books less well-known he's also an inspirational teacher and principal running his own school on the outskirts of melbourne he knows better than anyone the extent of the problem is there a teacher crisis at the moment yeah it's very hard to find teachers at the moment a few years ago when we advertised for teachers we'd get 40 60 80 applications now we get three or four really hmm that's a dramatic drop that's a dramatic drop what's driving that there's such a bad press about teachers there's so much negativity about the profession and about the occupation that people are scared away from it where they shouldn't be because it can be wonderful and should be wonderful hi guys how are you doing [Music] over his 40 years in education john's seen a lot of changes but most worrying he says is that teachers are now expected to be de facto parents to their students by default schools are being charged with doing all kinds of things and taking care of everything from giving consent in sexual relationships to learning how to program a computer to learning how to swim to learning how to speak a foreign language and so the given that the day at school lasts from about nine to about 3 30 and given that we only have school for about 40 weeks a year the agenda the curriculum has become incredibly crowded impossibly crowded and yet there's no extra time allocated for all these new roles that we're expected to take on [Music] emily bruin couldn't agree more and as much as it hurt she knew she needed to break free before teaching broke her i think towards the end i felt really resentful of my job i felt like it was taking too much from me it is frightening that there are lots of good teachers leaving in droves i think i think that the government needs to take a good hard look at why that might be happening and do something about it is a teacher's workload unsustainable look i think that there is more that we can do and i think when i speak is it unsustainable at the moment [Music] being able to produce the future leaders of the world is something that i don't think you'll get in any other kind of career we're teaching kids to be lifelong learners i want to be the teacher that i needed teaching's a calling and it is a calling these mostly first and second year masters students at the university of wollongong hope to become some of the teachers of tomorrow they're passionate about the profession and can't wait to get into the classroom they know what they're doing is important and also reckon they understand the difficulties these kids this current generation we are educating them to be future leaders of this country if we're not educating them what's going to happen to the country we've seen lots of headlines about a teaching crisis is there a teaching crisis yes yes that yeah i mean at the school that i'm placed at on one day they had 21 teachers down you can't run a company like that let alone educate people and run a school it could be the idealism of the young maybe even a little naivety but they're determined they won't be quitters within the first two weeks you're in placement so you get a really good picture of what is going to happen and i think that is a real eye-opener i don't think that a lot of people realize there's so much going on in the classroom you hope that the profession treats you as someone who's willing to like answer a calling and you know respects you accordingly does teaching have a bright future or is it as grim as what we're seeing at the moment with you know this crisis i think um we're starting to realize that being a teacher takes guts and we're seeing more people with guts coming into teacher education and becoming a teacher so i think the future is really bright for the sake of australian children the hope is their right the current reality though is not so rosy in schools around the country teachers say they're overburdened and overlooked and they're deserting the classroom in droves i want the future teachers to say i am paid enough that reflects my expertise i am paid in a way that reflects the complexity of my work and i am supported with enough time and resources to be able to teach the students well [Applause] [Music] high school science teacher alice leung is just one of thousands who've gone on strike in new south wales demanding a better pay deal and improved conditions we want the government to pay us the pay increase that's required we need a competitive salary and we also need more planning time to attract and maintain the teachers we need one two three four no not teachers there are more than 300 000 full-time teaching staff in australia that's about the number of part-time and casual teachers too but the number of people entering the profession is dropping off and many tell us that's because teachers these days are expected to do much more with less time teaching has become an undesirable profession it seems because the pay simply doesn't match the expectations and teachers are telling us that until the people in power start listening you could see more of them ditching the classroom and taken to the streets [Applause] [Music] [Applause] these angry new south wales teachers might not realize it but state education minister sarah mitchell says she's an ally not the enemy i absolutely understand that it has been a really challenging last couple of years there's no question about that and so part of it is yes looking at pay but it is also about looking at what we can do to support our teachers who are there we are serious about that work i think we've got a way to go but i'm i think that we are on the right trajectory by listening to our staff around some of those issues the numbers of people interested in becoming a teacher are dropping off are you concerned about the attrition rates i think what we need to be doing is talking up the positives of teaching as well and the fact that it is a great career but you can't just talk it up for the sake of it because you want to attract people to the industry you need to talk it up because the staff feel valued and actually want to be there yeah i mean it isn't what we're sensing at the moment well what i would say though is that we are seeing a decrease of people who are choosing to take up those teaching degrees and i think we do need to ask questions as to why and that's not an issue that's unique to new south wales that's nationwide ultimately it's the students here who are at grave risk of not really getting the education that they deserve that they should be receiving and when you've got teachers conducting classes of up to 80 students in them i mean that's unacceptable isn't it yeah i mean that's not happening in every school every day but it's not every day thank goodness but it's happening but no but i but i appreciate when you when we do have those challenges but like i said that's why we've got to work closely with our principals with our workforce teams to make sure that we've got the solutions that we need it's a dead set giveaway there's going to be a problem in the day when your child's rolled call is done by substitute teachers and then when you do go to your class and the teacher is a substitute and they say look you know they're open and also the students they say look this is not my forte this is not my experience but we'll see how we go a lack of teachers means a lack of education and that means disgruntled parents paul beach expects his children to be fully occupied when they're at school but recently he's been surprised to discover they've had more downtime than learning time at the moment if we're having you know four periods in a day and they attend the first period and the rest of the three end up getting put down as free periods because they don't have teaching staff and they've got to sit in the coal or watch a movie we're actually teaching them to disengage from school we're teaching them to go away from learning and give up is that what's happening it definitely is happening good morning how are you good thank you paul is a senior manager in the retail sector he says what he's now seeing at schools reminds him of badly run businesses that's why so many teachers are leaving now is because the workload and the pressure the programming the planning all that on top of it plus they're also having to do all these checks and balances and put ticks in boxes and dot the eyes and cross the t's to suit policies and procedures but the actual teaching staff who are employed as teaching staff i think they've just got to really focus on teaching engaging the students bringing them back online and and getting the best out of them so they all have their own little light bulb moments when things start to make sense at their own little rate certainly when i visit schools i know particularly around some of the admin workload and the fact that there is a lot that has been asked of our teachers which does take them away from that core teaching and learning that's why we really want to improve what we're asking teachers to do what they're focusing their time on who did most of the talking or was in most of the shops does the education system need an overhaul it needs more than an overhaul it needs a massive restructuring from the ground upwards but we don't have politicians or leaders with the vision to do that in the whole history of australian politics since federation we've had only two ministers of education who've had some knowledge of education because they've been teachers for a couple of years each but beyond that we've had rock singers be ministers of education we've had experts on the murray-darling irrigation system be ministers for education these people know nothing and yet we're expected to listen to them and take notice of what they say well have you thought about a career in politics john maybe you could be the next education minister no thanks for the offer but i'll stick to what i'm doing after 14 years of teaching high school english emily bruin found out a pleasant truth people with her experience are prized in the outside world within days of quitting she was hired by a tech company to create educational content or even just outlines you know so it shows a sort of built environment [Music] she also works as a copywriter and even finds time to pursue her true passion of writing novels sadly for the students she left behind these days emily couldn't be happier in the company that i work for i feel very valued which is fantastic and supported and trusted and i feel like there's a lot more space in my life yeah and a lot more control over what i do yeah hello i'm sarah arbo thanks for watching 60 minutes australia subscribe to our channel now for brand new stories and exclusive clips every week and don't miss out on our extra minute segments and full episodes of 60 minutes on ninenow.com.eu and the nine now app

Channel: 60 Minutes Australia

Views: 444,560

Keywords: 60 Minutes, 60 Minutes Australia, Liz Hayes, Tara Brown, Liam Bartlett, Tom Steinfort, Sarah Abo, karl stefanovic, 60Mins, #60Mins, teacher, education, school, student, study, career, class, exams, protest, wages, underpaid, overworked, stress, employment, high school, preschool, kindergarten, english, maths, science, university

Id: HSIj7syuggE

Length: 18min 37sec (1117 seconds)

Published: Sun May 15 2022