The teacher shortage will return unless teachers are given more time to prepare for their students, according to a poll of more than 1,400 members of the profession in NSW.
Teachers and parents will converge on Macquarie Street today from 7:45am to press for the first improvement to preparation time in more than four decades. They will carry an open letter signed by more than 16,000 teachers and parents.
The poll found about 85 per cent of teachers have considered leaving the profession because of a lack of preparation time. Nine in ten said a guaranteed extra two hours a week would make them more likely to stay.
“Teachers are telling us in overwhelming numbers that they need more prep time to do their jobs properly,” said NSW Teachers Federation President Henry Rajendra.
“This is a warning shot that can’t be ignored.”
Preparation time is the time teachers use away from the classroom to plan lessons, mark work, speak with parents, and work with the therapists and specialists who support children with additional needs. In NSW it is unchanged in almost four decades.
Classrooms have changed. The number of students with disability in NSW public schools has risen 75 per cent since 2021, to more than 220,000, and the great majority now learn in mainstream classrooms. Ninety-five per cent of teachers surveyed said the complexity of their students’ needs had grown since they began teaching.
“Teachers are dedicated to their students and want to stay, but they need the time to properly attend to the needs of kids with learning difficulties as well as those who need to be extended,” Mr Rajendra said.
Asked in the survey what an extra two hours would mean, teachers pointed to the complexity of need in a single classroom.
“I have 31 students in a cross-stage composite class: an autistic student, several with ADHD, two with critical attendance issues I am trying to re-engage, a student working well below level, and a high-potential student in both maths and English,” one teacher wrote.
Another explained where the time goes.
“I have a Year 7 student who can barely read. He needs significant adjustments just to access the curriculum, and it often takes me 30 minutes to prepare for his one lesson a week. Can I reuse that for the other students? No, because they can read. Multiply it by several students and you can see where the time goes,” the teacher wrote.
For one teacher it came down to a single child.
“I have a student who reads at a halfway-through-Kindergarten level, along with significant trauma. Extra preparation time would let me call her carers more, build in wellbeing check-ins, prepare the hands-on resources she needs, and meet with colleagues to share more of her wins. It would make a real difference to her,” a third teacher wrote.
The open letter, to be delivered to Parliament, calls on the government to provide an additional two hours of preparation time a week. Four years ago the Gallop Inquiry recommended exactly that as a matter of urgency. Teachers and families are still waiting.
“An extra two hours a week is the difference between a child being reached and a child being left behind,” Mr Rajendra said.
“It is the single most powerful thing this government could do for public school students.”
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