In the survey of thousands of Australian public school principals and teachers, conducted in March and April:
- 75% of teachers said they work more than 41 hours per week, with the average full-time teacher working 51.8 hours per week
- Only 4% of teachers said they believe their school is well-resourced, and 89% of teacher said they do not have sufficient resources to appropriately meet the needs of students with disability.
-
Nearly 40% of principals said they will not have adequate classrooms to meet enrolment demand in the next 3-5 years, with the average school requiring 4.5 additional classrooms.
- Teachers are spending an average of $963 of their own money each year on classroom supplies, amounting to approximately $243 million per year nationally.
- 94% of teachers said their school is currently have difficulty in retaining teachers in the profession, with less than 18% of teachers planning to stay until retirement.
Except in the ACT, public schools across Australia remain funded below the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS), which is the minimum level governments agreed a decade ago was required to meet the needs of students.
The challenges in schools have never been greater - more diversity and complexity in student need, increasing wellbeing and mental health issues and acute shortages of teachers due to unsustainable workloads.
Our principals, teachers and support staff are doing an extraordinary job, but they are being asked to do too much with too little and there just aren’t enough of them.
Fully funding public schools is the only way to ensure every child gets the support they need to succeed, and we can recruit and retain sufficient numbers of teachers. There needs to be additional teachers and counsellors in public schools, along with more support staff and specialist staff, such as speech therapists.
The AEU research comes after an inquiry, ordered by Education Ministers, warned in December that the underfunding of public schools is “undermining other reform efforts with real implications for student educational and wellbeing outcomes, teacher attraction and retention”. The Expert Panel that conducted the inquiry said the need for full funding was “urgent and critical” and it was a prerequisite for student learning and wellbeing improvement.
In the AEU survey, principals said the biggest beneficiaries if public schools were fully funded would be students who have fallen behind in literacy or numeracy and students with disabilities or learning difficulties.
Teachers need additional support for students with disability or behavioural issues, and more time within their paid hours for lesson planning, assessment and reporting were critical to assist them to improve student outcomes.
Principals, teachers, parents, unions, community members and state government all believe the Albanese Government should lift its SRS share from the current 20% to 25% by 2028.
This is critical if we are to address critical problems with attraction and retention of staff, and to ensure schools can provide the educational programs and supports students need.
The state governments also needs to step up and fund a genuine 75% of the SRS. That includes getting rid of the accounting loophole that inflates their SRS share by 4% via the inclusion of non-school spending.
