An analysis of Australian teacher workforce policy: Challenges and opportunities for teacher recruitment and retention

Abstract

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.

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated global teacher shortages, notably in countries like the UK, Netherlands, France, Japan, New Zealand and the US (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2024). Australia faces similar challenges, particularly in rural, remote, and disadvantaged urban schools. Urgent policy interventions are underway to mitigate these shortages, reflecting governmental commitment. This paper examines state-level teacher workforce policies, crucial in addressing shortages and indicative of government commitment to the issue. By analysing national responses and six state policy documents along with 14 supplementary initiatives, the study underscores a predominant focus on labour market-driven recruitment strategies to alleviate shortages. However, it highlights a lag in addressing teacher working conditions, professional status, and support for hard-to-staff schools. While national efforts are evident, effective implementation lies with the states, necessitating long-term solutions prioritising retention and enhancing the profession’s status.

Recent policy declarations at the national level – including both the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Declaration (Australian Government, 2019) and the National School Reform Agreement (Australian Government Department of Education, 2023b) – mandate collaboration between the state and federal governments on the development of a national teacher workforce strategy. The Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration proposes to ‘work with the education community to attract, develop, support, and retain high-quality teachers, educators, and leaders in Australia’s education system’ (2019, p. 11), with the National School Reform Agreement outlining the reform objective of ‘[r]eviewing teacher workforce needs of the future to attract and retain the best and brightest to the teaching profession and attract teachers to areas of need’ (2023b, p. 9).

Beyond these aspirational policies, and recognising the scale and severity of the problem of teacher shortages, the newly released National Teacher Workforce Action Plan (NTWAP) (Australian Government Department of Education, 2023a) offers a multifaceted approach to teacher workforce challenges, acknowledging various interrelated priority areas, from teacher supply strategies as a remedy to address teacher workforce shortages to addressing initial teacher education and highlighting teacher retention and the status of the profession. While the NTWAP has been well-received, also operating at the state level are a series of policies aimed at addressing teacher workforce issues that have received substantially less attention. In this paper, we turn our attention to teacher workforce policy texts at the subnational level, namely, New South Wales and Victoria, to draw attention to the multifarious framings of teacher workforce shortages, particularly the issue of teacher supply and demand.

Conceptual framing

This paper’s primary purpose is to problematise iterations of teacher workforce strategies currently in place across two Australian states to understand how governments construct teacher workforce shortages and responses in Australian education policy documents. While teacher shortages may seem self-evident – that is, there are insufficient teachers to fill vacancies – our analysis seeks to inquire into how the problem and its responses are constructed in policy texts that are instrumental in shaping the teaching workforce at this time of chronic teacher shortages.

Conceptually, this research is framed by the work of Savage (2020, 2022) and Savage and O’Connor (2019) in examining teacher workforce policy and planning documents within the context of nationwide teaching shortages and the development of the new NTWAP. While this action plan represents a new federal intervention into the issue of teacher shortages, Australia’s states are constitutionally responsible for the teacher workforce. The increased national attention raises questions about whether state or federal educational authorities are responsible for addressing teacher shortages. Savage and O’Connor (2019) provide a rationale for engaging with state-level policy texts that address teacher workforce issues. Although the responsibility for Australian schooling primarily lies with individual states, an analysis of recent federal government educational policy texts reveals a variety of competing discourses. Analysing state texts makes possible some insight into the complex ‘policy assemblage’ (Savage, 2020) across national and state jurisdictions geared toward current teacher workforce shortages. As Savage et al. (2022) have argued, ‘an assemblage approach to policy analysis is generative for understanding how national reforms have been made possible in a federal system in which schooling is the constitutional responsibility of states and territories’ (p. 967).

To do this, we employ critical policy studies (Ozga, 2021) as a framework, recognising that much of the discussion around teacher workforce policy is conducted within public administration, which relies on conventional approaches to policy analysis that seek to determine the most effective solution by conducting objective analyses of the problem. Aligning with critical policy research, this paper instead analyses the social construction of the problem, that is, how teacher shortages are constructed emphasising the priorities, rationales, and political contexts underpinning policy decisions (Diem et al., 2014).

Research Design

The project promoted a search of two Australian state government education department websites for workforce planning policy texts addressing teacher supply, demand, recruitment, and retention. We ultimately selected a total of six policy texts from New South Wales and Victoria for analysis. This included the following policy texts that were available before and after the release of the NTWAP in December 2022: NSW Teacher Supply Strategy 2021–2031 (NSW TSS); Teacher Workforce Strategy: National Proposals and NSW Initiatives (NSW TWS); The Victorian Department of Education and Training Strategic Plan 2022–2026 (VSP, 2022a); Victorian Teacher Supply and Demand Report 2020 (VTSDR, 2021); Ensuring a strong, sustainable and supported school workforce (VSSSSW, 2023b); Victorian Teacher Supply and Demand Report 2021 (VTSDR, 2023).

Two issues around the selection of texts were encountered. First, boundary dilemmas in text inclusion were identified during our first scan of each state’s workforce policies. At times, it is difficult to delineate the boundaries between teacher supply and demand and workforce concerns such as teacher recruitment, retention, teacher status, teacher diversity, and teacher distribution. Sometimes, these differences were simply linguistic, with teacher supply often referring to teacher recruitment. However, at other times, teacher workforce policy texts demonstrated more nuanced remit than simple supply and demand. For example, issues relating to teacher supply can encompass various issues related to the provision of a skilled workforce, covering a scope as wide as the attraction and completion of initial teacher education students in an undergraduate teacher education program to the distribution of teachers across diverse geographic areas. These boundary dilemmas importantly draw attention to the ways that problems are used as the basis for understanding teacher shortages. Second, it is important to note how quickly policy is shifting in this area, with unexpected policy announcements occurring regularly as governments seek to respond to the teacher shortage crisis. For example, in New South Wales, the election of a Labor government in early 2023 after three terms of a Liberal Coalition government pre-empted teachers’ biggest pay rise in almost 30 years (Car, 2023). Soon after, the re-election of a Labor government in Victoria saw the announcement of scholarships for those starting secondary teaching degrees at university (Andrews, 2023). These instances prompted the inclusion of 14 additional supplementary policy texts providing context and details regarding emerging policy initiatives. Even more recently, New South Wales has released plans to move lead teachers back into classroom teaching to provide more resources for classroom teaching. In the UK context, See and Gorard (2020) have identified how changes in the political agenda impact teacher supply and impact the stability of long-term teacher workforce planning: ‘[P]lanning for teacher supply has always been tied to politics. It rarely plans beyond 4 years since governments do not generally know if they will still be in power after 4 years’ (p. 437).

From here, we utilised thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) to deductively analyse the ways that workforce shortages have been represented in responses proposed by states. Policy documents have been considered in terms of the categories of supply, demand, recruitment, retention, and the status of teachers and teaching. Clear shifts in the most recent policy texts from both states highlight a move to a more multifaceted approach to the teaching workforce, driven by priority areas identified by the NTWAP. While many similarities exist across the two states, the distinct contexts have influenced and shaped how they have focused their teacher workforce policies. A discussion of the constructions of recruitment, retention, and status forms the basis of the next section.

Analysis

The problem of teacher supply and addressing teacher recruitment pipelines

Teacher recruitment refers to the process of attracting, selecting, and hiring qualified individuals to work as teachers in schools. This process may include targeted efforts to attract teachers to specific schools or areas, particularly those that are hard to staff, such as rural or disadvantaged communities or across specialised subject areas such as science and maths and domains such as inclusive education. In terms of teacher recruitment, rural/regional/remote schools in Australia face particular difficulties with attracting teachers (Cuervo and Acquaro, 2018) as do urban schools in disadvantaged areas (Rice et al., 2017). Indigenous communities are especially impacted, with high vacancy rates and difficulties in finding suitable staff, sometimes because of their geographic remoteness. More recently, the ITE pipeline has come under attack for declining enrolment and high attrition rates. As the Australian Teacher Workforce Data provided by AITSL on initial teacher education pipelines indicates, there was a strong downturn from 2018 to 2019 with a notable 19% decrease in ITE commencements from 2017 to 2018, with no recovery noted in the subsequent year (AITSL, 2023a). Because of the overemphasis in policy on teacher supply and demand (and an underemphasis on teacher retention), Initial Teacher Education is regularly blamed for teaching shortages. The idea that teacher education should be doing more to recruit teachers, graduate them more quickly and prepare them better (Caudal, 2022) is a common policy trope.

The NSW TSS (Department of Education [NSW DoE], 2021) establishes a rationale for an ‘evidence-based plan to continue to attract and grow quality teachers, with the right subject qualifications, to locations where they are needed’ (p. 3). Within the policy (NSW DoE, 2021), teachers are premised as the most important factor in determining both school and student success, with the quality of education and students’ ‘advancement’ predicated on the need to develop a ‘world-class profession’ (p. 1) by building on an ‘existing, successful, pipeline of teachers’ (p. 6).

Although the document claims that NSW is ‘leading the way’ (p. 6) in terms of ensuring that workforce planning is capable of meeting future projections, the NSW TSS recognises the challenges posed by ‘declining graduate teacher numbers, increasing student enrolments and subject-diversity demands’ (NSW DoE, 2021: p. 5). The NSW TSS highlights a 29% decrease in ITE degree enrolments over the 5 years prior to 2019, as well as retirement rates of 2.2% and 2.1% per annum for state secondary and primary schools, respectively. The factors responsible for these teacher supply issues – which date back to 2015 in NSW – include ‘changing perceptions of teaching as a career, perceptions about the complexity of undertaking a teaching degree, and barriers to entry for people seeking a career change to teaching’ (NSW DoE, 2021: p. 5). Alongside this, the document frames the distribution of teachers to non-metropolitan areas and the supply of specialist teachers (maths, STEM, inclusive education) as the core teacher workforce issues impacting teacher supply into the future.

The NSW TSS legitimises the DoE’s initiatives to address these issues through the use of technicist language ‘by drawing on workforce modelling, jurisdictional scans, analysis of teacher supply and demand drivers, and evidence of what works’ (NSW DoE, 2021: p. 6). Although modelling on the current supply and demand of teachers exists, no references are included to evaluation studies of initiatives designed to address teacher recruitment, retention, or status. Current modelling used to identify future targets appears assured by the ‘data-driven approach’ (NSW DoE, 2021: p. 6) that guides them, which notes that ‘the strategy will deliver 3700 teachers [by 2032] with the right subject qualifications placed in locations of need over the next [ten] years’ (p. 6). This figure, however, falls significantly short of the 11,000 additional teachers projected to be needed by 2031 as per the report commissioned by the NSW Teachers Federation and cited by the NSW Productivity Commission White Paper (2021b, p. 56). Submissions presented to the Legislative Council inquiry into teacher shortages in NSW (NSW Legislative Council, 2022) raised concerns about the success of the NSW TSS, particularly around monitoring and measuring the effectiveness of initiatives by the Federation of Parents and Citizens Associations NSW, but also about the adequacy of the initiatives themselves: ‘The Teachers Federation contended that the strategy “ignores the primary reasons for the decline in the attractiveness of the profession” and relies instead on recycled initiatives and untested, expensive long-shots that will produce only tiny numbers of teachers’ (NSW Legislative Council, 2022: p. 7).

With the development of the NTWAP, the NSW DoE has sought to highlight how a range of new initiatives and already established programs align closely with federally established targets and recommendations in the newly developed TWS (NSW DoE, 2023). This text sees that scholarships continue to represent a central feature in attempts to increase supply, with the state looking to attract the ‘best and brightest’ (NSW DoE, 2023: p.1) to teaching, and maximum scholarships of up to nearly US$100,000 in benefits on offer to those willing to teach in rural and remote locations, as well as others for in-demand subject areas for tenured times. Improving access to teaching education for mid-career teachers is also a feature of programs such as Teach for Australia, which offers an accelerated pathway for those with an undergraduate degree to become teachers. Notably, among the list of initiatives (NSW DoE, 2023), another workforce plan to increase supply involves converting temporary teaching roles into permanent roles, with the document indicating that ‘at least 10,000 temporary NSW teachers and support staff will be offered permanent roles in 2023’. This recognises the high levels of casualisation that have become more commonplace in a profession once recognised for job security.

The new NSW TWS also features increased use of provisional teachers in the form of conditional accreditation pathways and earlier employment in public schools, thereby delivering final-year pre-service teachers to the paid workforce earlier (NSW DoE, 2023). However, the short-term effects are not yet known, raising concerns that this approach could exacerbate early-career teacher departures, due to individuals entering the profession at a time of significant departures of more experienced staff, increasing workloads and commitment requirements in addition to reducing opportunity for mentorship. Nonetheless, greater numbers of conditionally accredited teachers, along with other alternative pathways and fast-track initiatives, may boost overall numbers, alleviating some of the stressors experienced by current teachers by supplying a very real need for casual relief teachers and acting to dissuade individuals from exiting the profession (Lampert and Dadvand, 2024).

Turning to Victoria, the state’s Department of Education (Vic DoE) has used its VTSDR to report on teacher supply and demand for several years. The VTSDR is an annually prepared report that draws upon several data sources, including the Vic DoE and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The report’s intent is to provide key data to state policymakers and cross-sector stakeholders, thereby affording an ‘impartial’ perspective on the state of supply and demand of teachers that withholds from offering ‘recommendations on policy changes to manage supply and demand’ (Victorian Department of Education and Training [DET], 2021, p. 3). The regularity with which the VTSDR is published provides the capacity to discern how areas of concern have developed over time and how the Vic DoE (re)frames these developments and constructs policy responses.

For example, the VTSDR 2020 indicated that the overall supply of teachers exceeded future workplace demands, that is, not only was the workforce supply sufficient to meet demand but it exceeded that demand by over 39,000 teachers in 2021 (Vic DET, 2021: p. 16), stating that ‘forecasts across all education settings, indicate that by 2026, the projected workforce of registered teachers will continue to exceed the demand for these teachers’ (Vic DET, 2021: p. 7). However, data and modelling provided within the VTSDR 2020 suggest that, despite an oversupply of Victorian teachers overall, the recruitment of teachers for certain subjects and in certain locations remains a challenge for government schools, indicating that the issue is not one of an overall shortage but instead localised shortages and problems with teacher distribution. This concern is reflected in the current VSP 2022–2026 (Vic DET, 2022a), which outlines that although the current workforce meets overall demand, ‘government schools in some locations continue to experience recruitment challenges for specific teaching roles, such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics, languages and special education’ (Vic DET, 2022a).

According to the VTSDR 2021 (Vic DoE, 2023a), forecasting continues to suggest that the number of registered teachers will grow at a rate exceeding demand, although at a slower rate than in previous reports. Although supply will keep up with the increasing demand until 2027, this will be across the education system ‘in aggregate’ (Vic DoE, 2023a: p. 17), suggesting that the availability of teachers in specific locations and for specific subjects has worsened, with demand for secondary school teachers also becoming a bigger challenge. Also, even though the teacher supply and demand report boasts certain advantages, the data in the report preceded the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent changes to the labour market. Alongside this are also pressures introduced by other education and schooling policies that increase demand for teachers, notably the Best Start Best Life reforms, which included the introduction of the Free Kinder program for three- and four-year-old children (State Government of Victoria, 2023b), as well as the continuation of the Tutor Learning Initiative that commenced in 2021 (State Government of Victoria, 2023c). The Tutor Learning Initiative has particularly come under scrutiny for luring teachers away from teaching by offering burnt-out teachers a better option to earn a living without the aspects of teachers’ work that cause them undue stress, such as overwork, unnecessary meetings and administrative roles.

The framing within this and other documentation suggests that although there is recognition of the potential development of a broader teacher shortage, the issue continues to be more about the distribution of teachers and the way unfilled teaching positions are experienced at the level of individual schools and regions. For example, the VSP 2022–2026 (Vic DET, 2022a) also notes that the rate of advertised unfilled positions grows as distance increases away from major cities. This is linked to not only long-standing difficulties staffing rural schools but also newer economic and population growth factors. In its VSSSW (Vic DoE, 2023a), a promotional overview of investments into the system’s teacher workforce, the department also relates ‘a tightening of the teaching workforce right across the country’ to higher national levels of employment across the economy and consequent reductions in ITE enrolments. The Strategic Plan and VTSDR also recognise demand-side challenges from projected population growth as well as areas of population growth in Victoria.

Considering the effects produced by the problem of unfilled regional, rural, and specialist teaching vacancies, the state government’s policy response in the Teach the Future initiative (State Government of Victoria, 2023a) seeks to combat these distribution problems via a broad range of strategies, including substantial financial commitments to fast-track the development of specialist and secondary teachers and additional primary-school maths and science specialists to train generalist primary teachers within these disciplines (State Government of Victoria, 2023a). This policy provides the specific financial commitments required to ‘invest in our teachers’ via targeted reskilling for hard-to-staff subjects. This policy suite also broadly outlines incentives for teachers to undertake positions within hard-to-staff locations and subjects, with financial incentives of between AU US$9000 and US$50,000 based on the degree of difficulty in staffing the positions (e.g. STEM specialists working in a rural location receive higher remuneration than those in urban centres) (State Government of Victoria, 2023b). Adding to these existing policy responses by the Victorian government is the scholarship program announced in 2023 that will make studying secondary education in the state free (DET 2023b). This new policy initiative will make scholarships available ‘to all students who enrol in secondary school teaching degrees in 2024 and 2025, with final payments if they then work in Victorian government schools for 2 years after they graduate – supporting around 4000 future teachers each year’ (Andrews, 2023).

These types of policy solutions have been used for more than 20 years and promise financial incentives to ensure ongoing teacher supply (Lampert et al., 2021). Efforts to recruit and retain teachers often emphasise financial incentives, especially for schools that are hardest to staff. These incentives are widely regarded as effective in attracting pre-service teachers and recent graduates. Common examples include tuition waivers, scholarships, loan forgiveness, signing bonuses, and increased salaries. However, despite their popularity, financial incentives have faced criticism, particularly concerning teacher retention (Blackmore et al., 2023). Research suggests that unless these incentives are substantial and linked to a commitment, their impact is generally limited to initial recruitment. See et al. (2020a) highlighted that incentives are effective only while they are in place, with no lasting impact once they are withdrawn. Thus, while these incentives may offer short-term benefits, they are not a reliable solution for sustaining teacher retention over the long term.

The emergence of teacher retention as a policy priority

Teacher retention strategies represent an important policy approach to addressing teacher workforce supply, diminishing the necessity of higher levels of teacher recruitment by reducing attrition rates. While the actual numbers have been debated, teacher attrition, particularly from early-career teachers, has been cited as an issue in the Australian context for some time, as has the intention to leave before retirement (OECD, 2005). Weldon (2018) has identified that a shortage of teachers results from not only a shortfall in the number of teachers able to be recruited into the profession but also the early attrition of individuals from the profession and what he calls ‘moveage’ (p. 67) from one school or system to another, which leaves certain schools with more difficulty recruiting and retaining teachers than others. According to Ingersoll (2001: pp. 524-525),

[T]eacher supply and demand imbalances and attendant school staffing problems are neither synonymous with, nor primarily caused by, teacher shortages in the technical sense of a supply-side deficit of qualified candidates…school staffing problems are primarily due to excessive demand resulting from a ‘revolving door’ – where large numbers of teachers depart their jobs for reasons other than retirement.

This situation results in higher teacher turnover, with teachers moving from schools and locations of low desirability to high desirability due to a higher number of vacancies across the system, meaning the common policy response of boosting teacher numbers via recruitment initiatives ignore the issue that teachers keep leaving due to neglected organisational and cultural issues.

Earlier iterations of policy documents made some acknowledgement of the demanding nature of teaching – for example, in the Foreword of the NSW TSS (NSW DoE, 2021), the Education Minister acknowledged that ‘the rate in which teachers are retiring has picked up’ (NSW DoE, 2021: p. 2) following ‘a challenging few years with severe drought, bushfires and the global COVID-19 pandemic’ (p. 2). This text presents retirement and attrition rates in a combined manner as a minor workforce challenge, with only retirement data provided (NSW DoE, 2021: p. 7). Similar to NSW, there were previously few direct references to teacher workforce retention in the Victorian context.

Nonetheless, more recent documents see the emergence of substantially more attention on teacher retention. Although neither state defines the problems of teacher attrition and retention, the two states have aligned new and existing departmental programs and initiatives to improve teacher retention. In Victoria, priority two of the VSSSSW document (Vic DoE, 2023a) is dedicated to supporting early-career teachers and teacher retention. Policy responses to address this include the expansion of the Career Start Pilot program (Vic DET, 2022b) to improve early-career teacher induction and mentoring, with graduate teachers receiving a reduction in teaching load of 20% to undertake more regular observations and professional learning in the first year, followed by a 10% reduction in the second year, with approximately 15% of new graduates in government schools being eligible to participate in the program (Vic DET, 2022b). To address teacher retention more broadly, investments are being made to reduce face-to-face teaching time by 1.5 h per week, supporting time-in-lieu arrangements for attending overnight school camps (Vic DoE, 2023a) and the development of the Teacher Reengagement Initiative (Vic DoE, 2023. p. 3a), which opens pathways for registered teachers no longer working in schools. NSW policy responses also take up the issue of teacher workload and the organisation of teachers’ work in the new Teacher Workforce Strategy: National Proposals and NSW Initiatives (NSW DoE, 2023), specifically linking these issues to address the theme of teacher retention through the Quality Time Action Plan (Department of Education, 2021a), which aims for a ‘reduction of 40 h of low-value administrative tasks per teacher per year’ (p. 2), equating to approximately 1 hour per week. Although these workload reductions follow some of the most significant pay increases for teachers in the last decade across both states (Car, 2023: 9 Sept), it is questionable how well this and other measures tackle current demands which note that many Australian teachers are now working 40% to 50% in excess of their regular paid hours, with classroom teachers self-reporting working an average of 53.7 h per week (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership [AITSL], 2023b).

Almost a decade ago, Mason and Poyatos (2015) conducted a review of the attrition and retention literature in Australia that identified 13 themes contributing to teacher attrition and retention, identifying issues such as school resourcing, the nature and complexity of the role, the value and prestige of teaching, and the presence and quality of support (p. 54). Aligning with the NTWAP, New South Wales teacher workforce policy responses acknowledge retention as a multifaceted problem with emerging strategies designed to address it, including programs to ‘develop’, ‘support’ and ‘streamline’ (NSW DoE, 2023: p. 1) teacher career pathways to leadership and Highly Accomplished Lead Teacher accreditation, the development of curriculum and assessment resources, curriculum support for the implementation of the national curriculum and support for participation in Quality Teaching Rounds professional development, as well as the effective utilisation of teacher education students, teaching assistants, and non-teaching staff through conditional accreditation programs for initial teacher education students (NSW DoE, 2023). Interestingly, although many of these initiatives also exist in the Victorian context, they are not specifically identified in the workforce response or explicitly linked to the goal of improving teacher retention.

Improved cultural competency also forms part of the framing response to teacher retention. The new NSW Teacher Workforce Policy includes mandatory training for ‘NSW teachers in ITE and ongoing professional development’ (NSW DoE, 2023), as well as an action plan to improve the number of First Nations educators working in the department. Evidence of this commitment statement has also been located in the NSW Department of Education Innovate Reconciliation Action Plan 2023–2025 (New South Wales Department of Education, 2024). While not specifically mentioned in the Victorian VSSSSW (Vic DoE, 2023a), the employment of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teaching workforce is incorporated in the Dhelk Wukang 2022–2026 Aboriginal Inclusion Plan (Vic DET, 2022c), a text that aims to prioritise a ‘culturally safe and thriving place for Aboriginal students, families, employees, volunteers, pre-service teachers, visitors and community partner’ (Vic DET 2022c: p. 7). The plan does include an Aboriginal Employment Commitment to improve the attraction and retention of Indigenous educators, although specific mechanisms are not discussed in detail. Including teacher diversity and cultural competencies can be connected to work done almost a decade ago by the More Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Teachers Initiative (MATSITI), which identified Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students as comprising 4.9% of the total student population, while in 2012 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers comprised 1.2% of the total teaching population (MATSITI, 2014: p. 7). More recently, the Australian Teacher Workforce Data report identified 2% of their national respondents as Aboriginal and Torres Strata Islander educators (AITSL, 2021: p. 197).

Teacher status on the margins

The decline of teacher status represents the most pressing – or ‘wicked’ – issue related to teacher attrition and retention, having been noticeable for many years now. Mackenzie’s (2007) study of teaching status noted how teachers felt undervalued, frustrated, unappreciated, and demoralised. More recently, the issue of demoralisation has increasingly been discussed in relation to how factors such as low pay and deteriorating working conditions cannot fully explain why teachers are leaving the profession (Santoro, 2018). Santoro proposes that demoralisation manifests as a type of professional dissatisfaction among teachers when they consistently face challenges that obstruct the realisation of the values driving their work. Ovenden-Hope and Passy (2021) are overt in their claim that ‘much of the problem with teacher recruitment and retention stems from the low status of the teaching profession’ (p. 2), a sentiment echoed by Mockler’s (2020) study of the representation of teachers in the Australian media, which highlighted how poorly teachers and their work were portrayed.

Addressing teacher status now appears to be a response that can address not only teacher recruitment but also, to a lesser extent, teacher retention. For instance, the first recommendation of the Strong Beginnings: Report of the Teacher Education Expert Panel (Australian Government, 2023a) suggests that Initial Teacher Education should encourage more people to become teachers, including by raising the status of teaching (Recommendation 1). This imperative is noted in the early NSW TSS focus on improving perceptions of teaching as a career via targeted awareness-raising campaigns, an approach signalled by the Education Minister in her Foreword: ‘[T]his strategy shows our current and future teachers just how highly the NSW Government, and the general public values them and the work they do every day’ (NSW DoE, 2021: p. 2). However, this strategy is proposed in the TSS without any problematisation of why perceptions of the profession might be diminishing. In the new NSW Teacher Workforce Action Plan (NSW DoE, 2023), new initiatives emerge that include encouraging members of the public to nominate teachers for Order of Australia awards as well as the rollout of the NSW Teachers Open Doors campaign (NSW Government, 2023), which brings together career, recruitment, and application information for prospective NSW teachers.

Meanwhile, Victoria opts for a less direct approach, instead establishing the priority area of teacher recruitment and career development. Most of their initiatives offer scholarships or financial initiatives to attract teachers into teaching. In a sideways logic, if more people can be attracted to becoming teachers – for whatever reason – this can be used as evidence that the status of teaching is improving.

Invoking teacher status as part of the workforce discussion has seen various framings emerge. The NTWAP (2023a) establishes awareness-raising campaigns, with the Be That Teacher campaign (Australian Government, 2023b), for example, promoting stories of inspiring teachers and awards such as Medals of the Order of Australia providing recognition. Yet circulating concurrently are additional framings. For example, the 2022 parliamentary review of teacher shortages in New South Wales (Great teachers, great schools: Lifting the status of teaching, teacher quality and teacher numbers in New South Wales) uses a different set of themes to construct a framework that indicates classroom teaching to be not up to scratch, suggesting that ‘if the students have not learnt, the teachers have not taught’ (New South Wales Parliament, 2022: p. vii). Synthesising 255 submissions and 11,000 online responses regarding the complex issue of teacher shortages and teacher status, the Chair’s Foreword concluded,

[T]he answer to structural teacher shortages is to make the job easier, to reduce the paperwork and administrative load. Most of the tasks they talk about, however, are integral to the job of teaching, such as marking tests and assessments, recording student data and learning plans, and ordering classroom materials. In practice, the most substantial improvements in teacher workload are likely to come from stronger student discipline – policies and practices that the ‘progressive’ Education Establishment has weakened in recent decades. (2022, p. vii)

This public stance touches upon several important issues related to teacher status: the diminishing of crucial elements of professionalism, such as public respect, autonomy, responsibility, and expertise, with a greater emphasis on the accountability and standards that ultimately determine teaching practices. This issue is again demonstrated by the framing of status in relation to teacher qualifications, with the notion of raising the status of the profession considered an important future directive that is, nonetheless, frequently undermined by contradictory action items, including the focus on the time frame for obtaining teaching qualifications. For example, Initial Teacher Education is posited as a problematic component, especially in New South Wales, within both the TSS and the new NSW Teacher Workforce Action Plan as well as other recent political texts, including Great Teachers, Great Schools: Lifting the Status of Teaching, Teacher Quality and Teacher Numbers in New South Wales (New South Wales Parliamentary Review, 2022) and the New South Wales Productivity Commission White Paper (2021b). The ‘long lead time to “grow” a teacher locally’ (NSW DoE, 2021: p. 8) – 4 years for an undergraduate degree – has been labelled a factor that contributes to the teacher shortage described in the NSW TSS, acting as the rationale for other strategies. These strategies include attempts to recruit teachers from other states as well as internationally and expedited accreditation of pre-service teachers. Tensions in the various policy responses have been identified as a teacher status issue, with policymakers grappling with the simultaneous challenges of increasing the number of quality teacher candidates, attracting teachers to areas with the greatest need, distributing teachers in a fair and effective manner, and retaining qualified educators over the long term.

Concluding discussion

Our analysis makes apparent that the dominant approach to addressing teacher workforce shortages builds on teacher recruitment and supply-side factors. Although supply and demand provide critical advice on workforce strategy and teacher shortages, relying on a ‘labour market perspective’ (Kelchtermans, 2017: p. 963) continues to highlight supply-side responses emphasising new teacher recruitment, whether that be from new graduates, attracting mid-career changers, or allowing early certification of pre-service teachers. Following closely are approaches concerning the redistribution of teachers, typically from metropolitan to rural or remote locations and across subject areas. This remains a prominent approach despite teacher workforce shortages now being reported across metropolitan and rural settings (see, e.g. Parliament NSW, 2023). Although teacher retention has been included in state-level representations more predominantly since the release of the NTWAP, policy actions remain in the pilot phase, under development, or only loosely tied to teacher retention. Teacher status at the state level remains marginal, with initiatives aimed mostly at improving public recognition of teachers. We would argue that, in the context of chronic teacher shortages, Australia’s teacher workforce policy requires greater consideration of the work of teachers if it is to address a more extensive set of concerns than those typically addressed in relation to labour market supply (Lampert et al., 2021). Not substantially addressing teachers’ work runs the risk of downplaying teacher retention and locking teaching into being a high-turnover profession by emphasising recruitment over retention (Tran et al., 2024).

The work of See et al. (2020b) critically reviews evidence that consolidates the results of robust empirical studies addressing teacher recruitment and retention, recognising the widespread use of financial incentives to address shortages, such as increased salaries for teachers, particularly those teaching specific subjects or working in specific areas, as well as scholarships aimed at attracting more people to enter the teaching profession or encouraging their retention after they become qualified. These long-standing policy responses reinforce the prominence of teacher workforce initiatives that emphasise teacher recruitment and redistribution with a continued reliance on initial teacher education enrolments (while also making initial teacher education accountable for teacher quality). This is not to argue against teachers being better salaried for their work. However, the existing body of research indicates that the efficacy of financial incentives and bursaries remains limited, particularly in relation to their impact on long-term retention (See et al., 2020a, 2020b; Blackmore et al., 2023). While extrinsic rewards, such as monetary incentives, can play a role, their effectiveness is greatly enhanced when combined with intrinsic motivators derived from mentoring, support systems, and access to professional development opportunities, including supported leadership prospects (Blackmore et al., 2023; See et al., 2020b). That is, monetary incentives may aid in attracting subject-specific teachers and educators to challenging areas, but their long-term effectiveness for retention is uncertain. The work of See et al. (2020b) suggests improving school culture and exploring factors such as accountability, mentoring, teacher stress, and working conditions to address recruitment and retention. Although there exists a body of research investigating the reasons behind attrition among teachers (Heffernan et al., 2022), the precise figures pertaining to this phenomenon within the Australian educational context prove challenging to ascertain, with little evidential groundwork concerning teacher turnover or ‘moveage’ and its ramifications across diverse geographic and socioeconomic settings. For example, Ingersoll and May’s (2012) research in the US revealed that while teacher retirements and student enrolments were matched by qualified teacher supply, significant issues arose from teachers transferring between schools. Particularly in high-poverty, high-minority, urban schools, poor organisational conditions drove teachers to leave for better-resourced schools, resulting in a perpetual cycle of turnover. Simply recruiting more teachers won’t solve this issue without addressing neglected organisational and cultural factors, perpetuating shortages in harder-to-staff schools.

Notably, newer framings emerging at the national level in the new NTWAP (Australian Government Department of Education, 2023a) address the retention and status of the teaching workforce, and aspects highlighted in both the existing literature and the AITSL’s conceptual work on teacher supply and demand (AITSL, 2021) encompass the range of these more expansive focal points. These include the support of teachers and the teaching profession through efficient induction and mentoring processes, promoting teacher wellbeing, investigating the influence of school culture on attrition and retention rates, ensuring access to quality professional development opportunities, and elevating teacher status (AITSL, 2021: p. 17). Furthermore, this conceptual framing also extends to macro-level factors that impact the teaching workforce, such as teacher pay, workplace conditions, teacher workloads, increased casualisation, improved salary and career trajectories, and changes in teachers’ responsibilities (AITSL, 2021: p. 15) with additional priority areas also including the need for more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers and a less transient teaching workforce for hard-to-staff schools, including those in rural and remote contexts (p. 17).

Elsewhere, research has highlighted several other concerns, including teacher burnout (Rajendran et al., 2020), teaching ‘out of field’ (Du Plessis, 2019), the changing nature of teachers’ work and increased workloads (Stacey et al., 2022; Thompson et al., 2023), and issues with job satisfaction, career aspirations, teacher status, and morale (Mackenzie, 2007), concerns that capture perceptions of the teaching profession within the wider community. Finally, broader societal issues such as housing costs (Eacott, 2023) and familial and caring responsibilities have also been acknowledged (Lampert et al., 2023).

Kelchtermans (2017) gestured in these directions prior to COVID-19, arguing for a shift in attention from conventional targets of the discourse – such as the supply of new teachers, public perceptions of educators, and the effectiveness of new teachers – to instead emphasise the more complex area of working conditions of teachers and make efforts to offer assistance that can attract and keep them in the profession. In that work, ‘multiple practical and theoretical educational themes converge: for example, professional development, career development, job motivation, self-understanding or identity, working conditions, social status of the teaching job, but also policy demands, institutional pressures, and life choices’ (Kelchtermans, 2017: p. 962). This expansive basis for understanding teacher workforce problems contributing to teacher shortages reinforces the notion that ‘[n]umbers alone can’t solve this problem’ (Kelchtermans, 2017: p. 963). This has been echoed by See and Gorard (2020), for whom ‘the teacher supply “crisis” is more than just about pupil and teacher numbers’ (p. 436). Instead, it systematically opens workforce policy to a number of important concerns that have been marginalised in teacher workforce discourses that repeatedly emphasise teacher supply and the diversification of teacher entry pipelines. Bringing together a better understanding of the day-to-day work of teachers would allow policymakers, government, and school leaders to gain crucial knowledge about how to address the challenges of recruiting and retaining teachers in a climate of teacher shortages, acknowledging the intersection of teachers’ work and the dynamics of the teacher labour market (Mathou et al., 2023), pointing more in the direction of policy responses that initiate longer-term solutions for ‘re-professionalising’ (Ovenden-Hope and Passy, 2021: p. 234) and strengthening the teaching profession. In their analysis of national policy responses to teacher shortages in the hardest-to-staff schools in both Australia and the UK, Mills et al. (2024) highlight (re)professionalisation as essential for the systematic changes needed to support the recruitment and retention of teachers. According to them, policies that label new teachers as ‘classroom (un)ready,’ provide prepackaged lesson plans to save time, fast-track teachers into the classroom, and devalue the theoretical foundations of teaching all contribute to the de-professionalisation of teaching work. They argue that addressing this requires a renewed focus on ‘trust, autonomy, and respect’ (Mills et al., 2024: p. 297). While Garcia and Weiss (2020) advocate for the U.S. to have a policy agenda specifically to tackle the challenges of recruiting and retaining teachers, they also stress that these ‘specific recommendations’ (p. 5) should not be viewed in isolation. Instead, these recommendations should be considered within the context of a key principles and the broader educational landscape. ‘If, as our overarching recommendations, we address the challenges that threaten equity and excellence in our education system, treat teachers as professionals, get all stakeholders involved, and tackle the issues with a set of comprehensive long-term solutions, then factors such as worsened conditions in high-poverty schools or a lack of useful professional development would take care of themselves’ (Garcia and Weiss, 2020: p. 5). By grounding an approach in these overarching principles to address teacher workforce shortages, we can advance towards more comprehensive and multi-dimensional policy responses. These responses should tackle critical national issues such as working conditions, organisational culture, wellbeing, workloads, pay and conditions, morale, and professional status – issues that necessitate systemic workforce reform.

Given the intricate nature of the teacher shortage, a comprehensive approach across government levels and within sectors and schools is imperative. While the federal government has an explicit national agenda and responsibility for the provision of teacher education (its only real lever), understanding state responses is crucial due to their pivotal role in teacher recruitment, retention, and status. Reflecting on Savage and Lewis’ (2018) policy analysis of national teaching standards, policies targeting recruitment and retention operate similarly. Rather than viewing national responses as a coherent reform agenda, exploring state policies reveals a complex landscape requiring attention to diverse policy ideas and practices. Addressing teacher recruitment and retention targets the core of the traditional educational responsibilities of the states, namely, teacher employment, teacher pay, working conditions, and educational cultures, with the policy enactment likely to be ‘contested’ (Savage et al., 2022: p. 975).

Despite the last decade’s substantial emphasis on educational reform geared towards addressing teacher quality, there has been much less attention on teacher workforce challenges such as recruiting new teachers and retaining the existing teaching workforce, particularly in the context of hard-to-staff schools, a problem that jeopardises all efforts towards the goal of educational ‘excellence and equity’ (Australia Government, 2019: p. 4).