Teaching: Better Paid, Still Broken

Teaching is a 9–3 job in the same way parenting is just birthday parties and Instagram photos.

In a previous post on Becoming a Teacher and the work of a teacher, I wrote about what teachers actually do beyond the hours the public sees. It was anecdotal. It was based on my lived experience and others’, tired eyes and Sunday-night lesson planning panic. But now we have something better, national data from AITSL that shows teachers aren’t just busy, they’re doing the equivalent of two jobs. AITSL’s analysis of teacher duties shows work weeks that push past 40 hours and drift into the 50s, with only about half of that time spent in front of students. The rest is planning, marking, reporting, admin, compliance, welfare, meetings, and the steady drip of “just a quick thing” that ends up consuming your Sunday. The lived reality wasn’t an exaggeration. 

We have seemingly addressed the pay issue – at least on paper. In NSW the floor lifted, and the ceiling nudged higher. A new graduate now starts on about $90,000+, with experienced classroom teachers topping out around $130k, and a three-year deal layering roughly three per cent increases each year. Other systems have moved too. Zoom out, and the OECD shows Australia has closed much of the historical gap with other tertiary-educated workers; our teachers now sit much closer to parity than the OECD average. Compared with broad graduate benchmarks in Australia (around the mid-$70,000s), teaching is no longer the bargain-basement option. All of that should help recruitment. It keeps a few good people from walking. But it doesn’t change the design of the job. You can pay more for economy class, but the legroom doesn’t change. Pay moved. The workload architecture didn’t.

AITSL categorises teacher time into neat little baskets: classroom teaching, planning and preparation, assessment and reporting, administration, compliance and accreditation, pastoral care, parent communication, and the extras that no one counts (until you burn out and leave the profession). But teachers don’t live neatly; they switch identities every ten minutes. Teach Year 9. Log a behaviour incident. Comfort a child who was bullied. Upload resources. Skim a new policy. Answer five emails. Detention duty. Plan tomorrow. It isn’t just long; it’s relentless cognitive pinball. 

It’s tempting to treat this as a time-management problem. Buy a better diary. Do a course. Colour-code. The truth is simpler and less marketable. It’s a job-design problem. Every level of the system adds requirements, and there is seemingly no incentive to remove them. New frameworks arrive with banners and breakfast briefings; old frameworks linger in the background like uninstalled software. “Top priority” is a label assigned to just about everything. Planning time shrinks to a novelty. After a while, you find yourself choosing between feeling guilty for working and feeling guilty for not working. A headline salary is nice, but it doesn’t solve the issue. It can only be solved by subtraction, and by leaders who protect time like it matters.

This also explains why teachers resist the constant search for silver bullets. People love solutions that live in a box: platforms, templates, pre-packaged fixes. The problem with boxed solutions is that they rarely remove anything. They add another login, another meeting, another dashboard. You might think that an emailed lesson plan every morning solves a time issue, but does it? Not if it takes you longer to download, read and differentiate that lesson for the 20% of uniquely divergent learners in your class than it does just to create one yourself. It is likely easier to design a lesson yourself, with the knowledge of the specific needs of learners, than it is to try to modify a ‘ready-made lesson’ for a particular context. Meanwhile, the thing that actually moves learning is still time: time to plan properly, time to mark with care and provide helpful feedback, and time to think and adjust. Everything else is garnish that somehow became the main course.

This is not about sympathy. Teachers do not want applause or cupcakes in the staffroom, nor do they want to be called heroes. They want a week that makes sense. They want to be judged on the quality of their work, not on how quickly they can upload resources to a platform that no one will ever read. The teacher shortage tells the same story. Early-career teachers leave within five years, and when asked why, they don’t say holidays or pay; instead, they cite workload. Students feel the impact when feedback is delayed and planning is rushed. Parents feel it when communication gets choppy. Schools feel it when vacancies sit open and relief lists run dry. Time is not a soft issue. It is the foundation upon which everything else sits. 

What works in the real world is often boring but effective. Not another task force. Not a wellness webinar, and certainly not another government review. Time, intentionally reclaimed, and the discipline to hold on to it. 

• Protect planning time like it means something. Not ten spare minutes between duties. Real blocks that don’t get raided for the crisis of the week. If leaders treat planning time as inviolable, teachers will treat lessons like craft again. 
• Subtract when you add. New program in, old program out. One in, one out, or it doesn’t exist. If everything is “top priority,” nothing is. 
• Shrink the admin creep. If it doesn’t move student learning or safety, it is optional or gone. Don’t make teachers evidence the obvious. 
• Fund mentoring, not folklore. Early-career teachers need lighter loads, scheduled coaching and someone they can ask questions to. “Sink or swim” is not a program. 
• Trust professional judgement. Teachers are not technicians reading scripts. Give them space to decide what their students need and how to deliver it. 

Trusting teachers is undoubtedly the most vital point on this list. Ready-made lesson plans and pre-packaged resources are not the answer. Teachers want to teach. When you give them scripts instead of space to think, you don’t lighten their load; you remove the part of the job that provides purpose and professional identity. It turns teachers into administrators of someone else’s ideas. The message received is clear: don’t worry about the important part, just read the sheet and keep up with the paperwork.

None of this is glamorous. It will not yield a glossy brochure. However, what it can do is give back the hours that are currently bled dry by meetings that could be memos, platforms that need weekly time sacrifices to keep the data gods happy, and compliance rituals that confuse evidence with impact. If you want to hold teachers to a high professional bar, and we should, give them the decent basics any professional needs… Time. Time to plan. Time to mark. Time to think and care.

Yes, pay needed to move. It did. NSW locked in a multi-year deal and published a scale that finally looks like we value the work. Independent and Catholic employers cluster nearby. Nationally, graduate salaries have stepped up, and internationally, we are no longer miles behind comparable professions. That is progress and worth saying out loud. It is also not the problem teachers talk about when they consider leaving the profession. The problem is the shape of the week. The thing everyone feels, and no spreadsheet fixes. You cannot compliance-module your way to a good profession. You repurchase it by pruning tasks, guarding time and refusing to treat every new initiative as sacred.

Teachers don’t need to be worshipped as heroes or martyrs. They need systems that recognise their work extends beyond the classroom door and well past 3pm. AITSL has said plainly what teachers have said for years: this job is not just teaching. It is designing, planning, caring, managing, documenting, reporting, comforting and sometimes breaking up a fight while holding a stack of unmarked essays. Teaching is important work. It is also work. Real work. If we want people to continue doing it and doing it well, we have to provide them with the one resource every job relies on. Time.