Australia's teachers spend up to 106 million hours every year on administrative and compliance tasks that should be handled by dedicated school support staff, a new report from the McKell Institute has found.
The report is in response to the Productivity Commission's inquiry Building a Skilled and Adaptable Workforce. The report urges the Commission to prioritise teacher retention and reduce administrative burden to improve productivity, instead of draft recommendations to government that risk deskilling core teaching work.
The report, Freeing Teachers to Teach: Driving Productivity Through Classroom Support finds that while the Commission has correctly identified time pressures on teachers as needing solutions, its draft recommendations risk narrowing teachers' roles to delivering pre-packaged lessons, instead of recognising their expertise in designing and adapting learning.
The report findings include:
• Teachers overwhelmingly identify administration, compliance, and lack of support staff as the biggest barriers to effective teaching, not lesson planning.
• One in three teachers plan to leave the profession, citing workload and administrative pressures as key reasons.
• Centralising lesson planning through a national platform and relying on AI tools risks hollowing out the profession while failing to solve causes of workload stress.
The report calls for:
• Funding more administrative and support staff in classrooms so that teachers can focus on teaching.
• The views of teachers to be included in designing strategies to minimise administrative burden.
• A national investment strategy to boost support staff in schools.
• A proactive and research-based policy for ed-tech and AI as teaching tools.
Quotes attributable to McKell Institute Victoria Executive Director Rebecca Thistleton:
"Teachers are burning out from administration and compliance, losing millions of hours to tasks better suited to support staff.
"Lesson planning is core to being a teacher. Treating it as 'administration' misses the point and risks devaluing the intellectual and creative work they do."
