Year 5 teacher Brittany Herrington says she does about 20 hours of overtime every week.(ABC News: Sim Beardsell)
Brittany Herrington has wanted to be a teacher for as long as she can remember, but her short teaching career has come at a huge financial, physical and mental cost.
A new Australian Education Union (AEU) survey of public-school teachers found 39 per cent of early career educators were planning to leave the profession within a decade.
The same survey in 2020 found just 18 per cent of new teachers wanted to quit within the same time frame.
Ms Herrington said she had given the job her all in three years, but could not see a sustainable path forward.
She said she had so far spent more than $17,000 of her own money on work expenses and was forced to sell her car earlier this year.
When I think about the fact that my house deposit was $19,000, that's not a small amount of money to have spent on things that I need to do my job, she said.
The ACT teacher said staff shortages made it difficult to take time off when sick or injured, because there were not enough relief teachers.
When she needed surgery this year, she scheduled it for the last day of term so she could use school holidays to recover instead of taking sick leave.
It's the personal decision of understanding that it's going to have a negative impact on my kids and it's going to have a negative impact on my colleagues if I'm not at school, she said.
Ms Herrington always wanted to be a school teacher.(ABC News: Sim Beardsell)
She said the children in her Year 5 class were at such different levels, she needed a wide range of resources to teach them.
I can be teaching a lesson about spelling and reading at Year 5 level, and have children in the room who don't know the whole alphabet, she said.
As teachers, we are wanting to have as many resources as we can to address different needs and it's hard at a school level to provide that.
She said as well as putting in about 20 hours of overtime each week, most evenings were spent worrying about her students.
I cannot tell you how many nights I've spent crying thinking about some of my kids, she said.
Worrying about what their future might be like, what their present is like, what it's like coming to school when you can't read, and you can't write, and everybody around you can.
Lately, things have become so overwhelming Ms Herrington is thinking of quitting.
It is way more stressful and a lot more work than I could have ever anticipated it being, she said.
It's something I really wanted to do, and I do love it … but I don't think that this job is sustainable.
Survey shows many new teachers already want to leave
The AEU data, collected between March and May this year, surveyed 546 principals, 1,280 support staff and 5,982 teachers, including 458 teachers in the first three years of their career.
It found that many of those new teachers were considering an exit, with 39 per cent planning to leave the profession within a decade.
AEU president Correna Haythorpe said the workforce was in crisis.
Governments need to focus on the issues that new educators are saying are making them leave the profession — that includes escalating workloads and working with complex needs of our children, she said.
Education Minister Jason Clare said the statistics on teachers leaving the most important job in the world were shocking.
He said the government already had a number of initiatives in place to address the issue, including the National Teacher Workforce Action Plan aimed at attracting and retaining teachers.
He said green shoots were already appearing, with the number of university enrolments in teaching up by 2.5 per cent for next year.
[We have] $40,000 scholarships to encourage some of our best and brightest to think about becoming a teacher rather than a lawyer or a banker, he said.
He also said the government was committed to following through on its promise to raise funding for public schools to the minimum standard — a policy detailed in the Gonski review a decade ago.
Aunion-commissioned analysis of data from the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Authorityfound less than two per cent of public schools were funded to that minimum.
On the other hand, more than 98 per cent of private schools were funded above that standard.
I think over the last 10 years, governments haven't focused on fixing this — I am, he said.
We've made a commitment at the election … to work with states and territories to make sure that we close this gap.
AEU president Correna Haythorpe says the teaching workforce is in crisis.(ABC News:Lincoln Rothall)
Ms Haythorpe said a long-term strategy was overdue.
With one-in-10 students effectively underfunded, what we see is a lack of specialist support for them with their teaching and learning programs, she said.
That's why we have unsustainable workloads.
Brittany Herrington does not want parents of the children in the public system to be alarmed though.
The reality is, at the moment the kids are OK, and they are getting what they need, she said.
It's at the expense of their teachers' and school leaders' wellbeing — and that's not sustainable.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-25/public-school-teachers-increasingly-want-to-leave/103142210
