Addressing time poverty is the key to the crisis of teaching

Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 129 No 8, 1 November 2024, page no. 8

Increases in teacher workload and the complexity of teacher work are direct contributors to Australia’s teacher shortage crisis. Both contribute to increases in workforce attrition and decreases in the number of people choosing teaching as a career. Declining numbers of new graduate teachers, increasing demand from a growing student population, and an ageing teacher workforce are all contributing to Australia’s this crisis.

The teaching profession has sought to tell governments and school systems that school environments are becoming more complex as the profession deals with occupational violence, student behaviour, administrative demands, and workforce shortages.

New research, conducted in partnership with QTU and supported by QTU members, has looked inside the heavy hours of the work that teachers and school leaders do. The research has developed new understandings of the crisis of teaching, and why teaching has become so demanding for experienced teachers and unattractive for many young people considering their career options.

Too often, proposals to solve the problem of teacher workload fail to consider the complex cognitive, emotional, or psychosocial labour required to perform tasks. Time poverty is the relationship between the amount of work a teacher or school leader does and the intensity or complexity of that work. Addressing time poverty must be a focus of governments and school systems to make teaching more attractive and sustainable.

Teachers and school leaders are required to continually stack tasks. This layering is exacerbated by disruptions that accumulate across a day and can lead to teachers feeling under constant pressure. Teachers deal with layering of tasks through the triaging of time. Tasks that are deemed immediate, like logging behaviour incidents, often diminish time for those tasks that require more thoughtful preparation, but which are more professionally rewarding. The cascading effect of this triaging of time is that it is difficult to make up time that has been lost due to those unplanned and unexpected disruptions.

Time poverty prevents teachers from doing the things they value most. Layering of tasks, triaging of time, and cascading effects compound and accumulate, resulting in teacher and school leader work that interrupts time for personal and familial responsibilities. In effect, teachers and school leaders are robbed of their job satisfaction and many teachers in the profession worry about the sustainability of teaching as their career choice.

Recommendations

• There is an urgent need to address the ecology of work within schools. Governments and school systems must:
• redefine issues of teacher workload with an understanding of time poverty
• reduce administrivia
• quarantine break times throughout the day to allow teachers and school leaders to rest and rejuvenate
• mitigate pressures that are created by daily unplanned and unexpected disruptions to teachers’ and school leaders’ work
• ensure timetables feature opportunities for collaborative innovation
• guarantee non-contact time is not lost to the cascading effects of time poverty.

Professor Greg Thompson

Craig Wood, QTU Research Officer

Professor Greg Thompson is Chief Investigator of the Time Use, Teacher Work Time Poverty research project, and has been a regular keynote speaker at QTU conferences and events. Greg was a high school English, History and HPE teacher, and is currently Professor of Education Research at QUT’s Faculty of Creative Industries, Education & Social Justice.