On desire
Why the teaching workforce is exempt from the mechanisms of supply and demand
Australia is suffering from an acute teacher shortage. But ours was on the horizon well before COVID-19 brought it to a crisis point. A lot of countries are currently in the grips of labour shortages and I’ve been thinking about the fundamental differences between teaching and other industries. I retrained after a career in advertising and fashion, so I find it interesting to look in from the outsider, and a few observations have led me to worry that the shortage may become chronic.
On levers in industry
It could be useful to draw comparisons to another industry facing talent shortages, the tech industry. My partner works in tech and a lot of his leadership role is making sure that talent are stimulated, fulfilled and doing meaningful work. Tertiary qualifications aren’t needed to earn a healthy starting salary in his industry - in fact tertiary qualifications are seen as fairly redundant, even a teensy bit uncool. The bar to entry is low in this sense, and with the shortage, some organisations are willing to mentor skilled people into roles. Workers set professional goals and are coached to achieve them. There’s a hierarchy in relation to who does what kind of work and the pay is commensurate. Talent can leave organisations to seek out sexier work at any moment and so there’s a lot of effort put into making the work experience interesting and the environment welcoming. I remember visiting Atlassian a couple of years back and seeing several beers on tap, workers wearing jeans and sneakers, and full catered lunches each day.
I know we don’t have this kind of money in education - I mostly put that point about the beer taps in there to imagine your collective mouths drop open! But there are structural issues with remuneration and perceptions of ‘talent’ in ed-recruitment that ultimately mean schools are not driven by those same fears and desires as tech, even in the midst of a crippling shortage.
On the recruitment and retention problem in education
Five years of full-time study, a student debt and a graduating salary of about $80K is not an incredibly attractive proposition if you’re a young person or a career changer. This potentially means that we don’t have a steady stream of teacher stock coming onto the market. I’m in favour of qualifications but since our pay scale is more like that in nursing or the public service, why a two year education degree?
To add to this, the idea that we all do a job worthy of the same pay suggests that teachers are roughly the same quality. So culturally, there’s not a real perception of ‘talent’ and usually nobody wooing us to stay in our roles1. A teacher of 30 years experience can be replaced with a grad. And if principals do want to attract or entice talent, what levers can they realistically pull?
Teacher work tends to be ‘flat’ as opposed to ‘stratified’, and this is seen in the kind of tasks we do. There’s often no hierarchy of importance meaning that collecting permission notes, wiping noses, and herding children onto buses is often competing for attention with professional development and lesson planning. Doing meaningful work is difficult when we seem to be pulled in all directions. Again, until the recent Grattan report, there were no levers in this area. It remains to be seen whether teachers will join industry in embracing a strategic approach.
The missing part of the supply chain, as far as I see it, is desire. Desire to work in education, desire to retain staff, desire to implement change. Principals for the most part get essentially three to four months’ notice to replace staff who drop out of the industry or move on, so the pain itself is not immediate or acute. Yes, school leaders are feeling the pain of a shortage, but it seems like we have a supply issue with no real sense of demand. Without a cultural shift, including the idea that teachers are ‘talent’, I can’t see the shortage resolving.
I’m fostered in my role and very happy, for the record. Hello to my principal who reads this newsletter!