From The Age: Teaching profession struggling with pandemic burnout

The teaching profession is dealing with long-term disruption by the coronavirus pandemic as the industry grapples with teacher burnout and a potential supply shortage.

Teachers have reported struggling with a lack of support during the move to remote learning, overwhelming workloads, poor pay and conditions and low public respect for the role, and want an overhaul of the profession, according to new research led by Dr Louise Phillips, Associate Professor of Education at Southern Cross University, with a team of international researchers.

“I was heartbroken. It really did bring tears to my eyes reading the data,” Dr Phillips said.

“I’m pleased we did this research so that you could really see the outpouring that many teachers gave.

“If we understand the impact, we are more able to help address the issues, and hopefully retain more teachers in the system.

The researchers surveyed 624 teachers from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and the United States to get a global view of the issues facing education.

Dr Phillips said the issues with teacher burnout and resignations had to be addressed immediately.

“The crisis is now. The impact of burnout is not in the minority, it’s the majority,” she said.

“People are walking out, there’s a large shortage of teachers because of the lack of societal valuing of the profession.

“We need to have governments that value education and demonstrate that through investment.”

State school teachers in Victoria and New South Wales are currently involved in industrial action campaigning for improved pay and working conditions.

Earlier this year, the Australian College of Educators’ 2021 teachers report cardfound that 85 per cent of Victorian teachers find their job rewarding, but 83 per cent of them have thought about leaving their profession in the past year.

The reasons included workload, remuneration and work-life balance.

Victoria University director of learning and teaching Ligia Pelosi said teachers had left their jobs for a number of reasons, including burnout and resistance to vaccinations, which had led schools to approach graduating teachers to fill roles.

“I don’t ever recall so many students having jobs at this stage of the year,” Ms Pelosi said.

“There have been schools contacting our partnerships department to say that they’ve had jobs advertised and not even gotten one application. To hear a school say zero applications for an advertised position is actually quite amazing.”

The pipeline of new teachers had been of such concern to the industry that a partnership of universities, education bodies and the state government moved to reduce students’ required in-classroom training hours to ensure they could graduate on time despite lockdowns.

Ms Pelosi said some positive news was that the issues currently affecting schools had seemingly not affected prospective teachers, judging by VTAC preferences data for degrees at Victoria University.

“Teaching is strong,” she said.

“The pandemic highlighted it’s one of those jobs where you’ll always be in work no matter what happens.

“You have to be in it to know about the burnout effects, but people who apply tend to be idealistic and driven by passion.”