I don’t blame them but fuck this is scary.
For at least a generation successive governments, both labor and liberal, have consistently allowed the pay and conditions of teachers to get worse and worse banking on the fact that the people that enter the profession are passionate about it and have been willing to bear the increasing burden because of it.
It has now gotten to the point that all of the people that I know that are now in teaching not only don’t recommend it as a career but actively discourage young people who voice an interest in teaching.
For years we have heard politicians voice the attitude “If you don’t like it, get a different job” when current teachers push for improved conditions.
Well motherfuckers, you are now reaping what you have sowed for decades.
Literally happened to me. I went back to my primary school for work experience - I had the incredible pleasure of being placed with a teacher who had inspired me a lot as a younger kid.
I’ll never forget. One time at lunch, she just sat down with me on duty and said in the most soul deep tired voice I’ve heard “is this what you want?”. Don’t think she said a word after. Woke me right up.
It’s criminal what we’ve done to our education system.
That is what makes it so terrible.
Great, inspiring teachers literally change people’s lives and our governments treat them like dirt.
Teacher of 20+ years checking in. Schools only continue in their current state because of the hard work and good will of education workers. It’s not an endless resource though. If governments keep ignoring problems in schools, they will collapse as people can’t afford to work there anymore because of the financial or mental health costs.
Wage is exactly why I did not consider teaching. Grad salary for secondary ed in Chemistry or Mathematics in WA is 78k. That means you’ve completed enough chem or math units to complete a degree, and then done teaching on top. The grad salary on the mines is far higher, and with that much math you could go into the actuarial field and make 200k in a couple of years.
Why would I study an extra 1 or 2 years to be paid less?
(To be fair, I did none of the above. But it is why I didn’t go into teaching)
Stressful training and work environment, long hours, and the pay isn’t that great either. This really is the government’s problem to solve - and it’s probably not going to be solved just by paying people once to complete their degree, it will have to be throughout their career by providing more pay and more support. Which of course means the public will eventually end up footing at least some of the bill - but the alternative, where education is compromised, will end up costing even more.
We shouldn’t concede that the public has to pay more to fix this problem. We just need to pressure our government representatives to prioritise funding for education above that of other areas.
The average teacher makes $84,810 per year.
It is estimated that there are 307,041 full time teachers.
This equates to a full teacher salary budget of $26B. We know that education is managed at the state level, but let’s just experiment with a scenario whereby the federal government decides to provide a funding boost to salaries. Giving all teachers a 25% pay rise would cost $6.5B per year.
How much was the 2023 budget surplus just recently announced by the government? $22B.
So, the government could have covered a 25% pay increase to all teachers in Australia, using a third of the surplus that they realised in this year’s budget.Ok, that’s for one year, but what about future years, you might ask…
Well, how about we take some of the funding from the scrapping of Stage 3 tax cuts. The Parliamentary Budget Office estimates that the cost of the Stage 3 tax cuts will be $313B over a decade ($31.3B per year). Those tax cuts could even be watered down so that they don’t impact lower incomes. The top 20% of income earners in the country receive 73% of the benefit from those tax cuts.
Let’s only have tax cuts for the bottom 80% of income earners. That would still give us $22.8B per year in extra budget that we allocate to education. It’s that simple.We are already seeing the result of this. This is the result of this.
I don’t want to disrespect teachers, but the really skilful teachers, with innate people-management skills ended up in the private sector, in high paying people-management roles.
This resulted in only the truly passionate teachers staying on the industry. These passionate teachers were easy pray for manipulative, trouble-making students, which forced more and more teachers out of the industry.
This has been a negative-feedback loop over the last 40 years. The only way to resolve the this is to (strategically) pump money into pulling people out of the private sector and back into teaching.
I am sure that there are thousands of people in middle management roles who would love to take on a teaching (or educational management) role with KPIs based on benefit to society, rather than benefit to the pay packet of the next manager up the org chart, as long as they had a decent wage.
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