Amy McPherson

In this paper, we present a case study of hard-to-staff secondary schools to examine teacher turnover in Australia. The paper draws on interviews with teachers and school leaders to explore issues related to turnover, an aspect of workforce instability that is less recognised in discussions of the Australian teaching workforce. We situate this analysis within the broader context of education marketisation to consider the implications for disadvantaged schools in the context of widespread teacher shortages. We map the dynamics of localised experiences of turnover, highlighting the impacts of marketisation on the teaching workforce through increasing competition between schools for teachers, the ongoing process of continuous recruitment, and the complexities of teacher retention in hard-to-staff schools. We demonstrate how this cycle of constant staff replacement not only disrupts school stability and social relationships but also places additional strain on remaining teachers and leaders, creating unsustainable working environments that further drive turnover contributing to increasingly stratified working conditions for teachers across different school contexts.

This chapter explores several implications of the changes to Initial Teacher Education that are happening at a time of unprecedented teaching shortages in Australia. In doing so, we hope to illustrate the complexity of these changes and the risks that some of these changes may pose to educational equality. Drawing on Bourdieu, we consider teacher education reform in Australia, including scaling down social justice curricula and fast-tracking teacher education. We examine how these changes may diminish the focus on producing teachers who understand the context of young people and their families in historically disadvantaged communities and how this may reproduce social inequalities.

In a climate of pervasive teacher shortages, initiatives have focused on attracting new teachers to the profession, with hardest-to-staff schools more likely to fill vacancies with early-career teachers, including those with conditional status. In Australia, workforce policy prioritises induction and mentoring to support transition to the profession and improve retention. This paper aims to understand mentor teacher experiences in hardest-to-staff schools, where a growing cohort of inexperienced teachers increases the need for mentoring. The analysis is based on data from semi-structured interviews conducted with teachers in six schools across two Australian states, as part of a larger project exploring work experiences of teachers in hardest-to-staff schools. In addition to formal mentoring, our findings illustrate that in these schools, informal and incidental mentoring is widespread. Further, the iterative nature of novice teacher induction creates a sense of ambivalence in longer-serving teachers. While experienced teachers find reward in supporting early-career colleagues, the hidden labour inherent to constant incidental mentoring encroaches on the time available to manage their own workload, sometimes leading to frustration and even resentment. We conclude that while mentoring is crucial with so many new entrants to the profession, policymakers should be aware of the labour associated with increased incidental mentoring to avoid unintended consequences for teachers who find themselves in the position of supporting growing numbers of new staff.

In this paper, we report on some early findings from a project that explores the experiences of teacher shortages in hard-to-staff schools in Australia. We provide an in-depth account of the experiences of teachers who remain at schools characterised by unfilled vacancies, high staff turnover and a limited casual relief workforce. These experiences are often overlooked because most studies concerning teacher shortages typically analyse such issues through a labour market lens, concentrating on supply and demand and the extent and causes of the shortages. We use a work-storied approach that includes data from purposeful conversations, walking interviews, work-shadowing and journals, to examine the impact of teacher shortages on schools with low scores on the index of community socio-educational advantage across rural and metropolitan. This research explores how school leaders and teachers who remain in their roles respond to the challenges of teacher shortages. It examines the strategies they respond to these issues, focusing on how they adapt and modify organisational structures and norms to manage the impacts. We demonstrate how teacher shortages cause ripple effects across schools that create challenges beyond filling vacancies: the hard-to-staff schools in our study must simultaneously manage high teacher turnover, attrition, induction, out-of-field teaching, teacher workload capacity, and student behaviour issues. Ultimately, the current workforce conditions force strategic responses to unfilled vacancies and high teacher turnover in ways that intensify the already high-pressure working conditions for teachers and school leaders.

The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the shortage of teachers worldwide. Shortages have been reported globally including in countries such as the UK, Netherlands, France, Japan, New Zealand and the United States. In Australia, persistent challenges in teacher recruitment, and retention, especially in disadvantaged schools have worsened, with rural and remote schools struggling to attract teachers, as well as urban schools in disadvantaged areas necessitating fast-tracked policy measures have been necessitated to address the teacher shortage. This paper focuses on teacher workforce policy given its prominence in the conceptualising and responding to teacher workforce shortages. The paper seeks to explore state-level teacher workforce texts with a focus on the ways workforce issues are constructed at a time of chronic teacher shortages. Utilising thematic analysis of six stated development policy texts, the paper argues state responses continue to emphasise teacher workforce planning based on a labour market perspective that prioritises teacher recruitment as the primary mechanism for addressing the teacher shortages. A delay in addressing the conditions of teachers’ work and the status of the profession as well as a notable inattention to priority areas such as hard-to-staff schools is also noted.

In recent years, a number of controversies related to climate change, racism and Black Lives Matter, and gender and sexual diversity have characterised public debate in Australia about politically charged content in schools. This paper explores one jurisdiction’s “Controversial Issues in Schools” policy through three broad areas of discussion. We begin by analysing the current social and political context in Australia at both a state and national level to consider how debates around controversial issues in schools have been utilised to exploit both existing and emerging cultural divisions. We then examine some of the philosophical claims central to the “Controversial Issues in Schools” policy before considering a single case of teacher deliberation in relation to the policy. The paper argues that the policy does little to support teachers in bringing up controversial issues in the classroom particularly given the ways teacher conduct in relation to controversial issues is treated in public discourse. Engaging with controversial issues as a matter of teacher conduct fails to acknowledge the epistemic, ethical, and political nature of controversial issues and teachers’ deliberation in relation to such concerns and constructs teacher conduct as a central concern.