‘Diabolical’: why Australia’s teacher shortages are among the worst in the world – and who is suffering most | Australian education

Mathew Burt has been principal at Broome High School for less than a decade, but he is one of the longest-serving school leaders in Kimberly.

Burt, who spent most of his teaching career in Perth, decided to relocate the tree north in 2018 with his wife and two children. He said the teacher shortage was affecting the whole of Western Australia, but the crisis would only get worse as we moved further into the region.

“You go to some metropolitan areas and you see teachers and principals who have been in schools here for 15 years or more,” he said. “When principals change every few months, as is the case in some regional or remote areas, it is simply an unknown and as a result the community’s trust and confidence in that school declines.”

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Australia’s teacher shortage is among the worst in the world, with disadvantaged and remote schools suffering most, according to an international report.

OECD International Teaching and Learning Survey (Talis), published this monthIt found that four in 10 (42%) lower secondary principals in Australia agreed that teacher shortages in their schools were hindering the quality of education, almost double the OECD average of 23% and above 14% in 2018.

Australia also recorded the largest staff shortages in regional schools (63%) and disadvantaged schools (67%); these schools are defined as having more than 30% of students come from socioeconomically challenged homes.

Save Our Schools organizer Trevor Cobbold said the report showed Australia was facing a “diabolical staffing crisis”.

“Increasing shortages constrain learning in schools, especially disadvantaged public schools,” he said. “There is a major obstacle to narrowing the huge achievement gap between rich and poor.”

The report found Australian teachers work an average of 46.5 hours a week, well above the OECD average of 40.8 hours, while almost two-thirds (65%) experience high stress and 80% say their work negatively affects their mental health.

The results resonated UNSW study The report was published in August, revealing that teachers experience depression, anxiety and stress three times the national norm, closely linked to their workload.

according to Australian Institute of Teaching and School LeadershipApproximately 30% of teachers consider leaving the profession before retirement age. 1,279 teachers resigned in 2024-25 in Western Australia alone, Department for Education figures showedThis is the highest figure since the data began being published in 2005.

Australian Education Union President Correna Haythorpe said the scale of the problem was “unacceptable for a rich and developed country”.

He said shortages began rising three years ago as Australia emerged from the pandemic and prospective teachers rethought entering the profession while others reconsidered how long they would stay. He says the source of the crisis has been apparent for some time.

“We have a public education system that is so under-resourced…teachers carry that burden because you don’t want to let any child down.”

A report by the Australian Primary Principals Association, published last monthHe appealed to the principals of schools that had lost their areas of expertise such as music, language and art, supported students with disabilities, and experienced absenteeism due to lack of teachers.

“Every day starts with a spreadsheet of who is absent and ends with wondering how much longer we can keep this up,” one district manager said in the report.

At the end of 2022, education ministers reached an agreement. National Teacher Workforce Action Plan to eliminate deficiencies and focus on supply, education, promotion and retention of the profession. Since then there has been a 7% increase in annual applications for teaching degrees and changes to teacher education have been announced.

Individual states also made some gains. In New South Wales, for example, state school vacancies fell by 61% in three years; There were 962 unfilled teaching positions in the third term of 2025, compared to 2,460 in the same period in 2022.

This change was largely attributed to the pay deal for teachers to become some of the highest-paid teachers in the country by 2023, as well as recruiters at each school.

Haythorpe praised what had happened at the start of the pipeline but said funding was “equally critical.”

“It should be used to handle the increased workload, to make sure we have more instructional support staff, thus relieving the burden on teachers and giving them time to teach in the classroom,” he said.

Burt also acknowledged small gains in WA, including incentives for student teachers to complete placements in regional schools, but said this did not help retention, affecting not only student performance but also community cohesion.

Burt’s daughter recently started her teaching degree and is taking advantage of government scholarships and paid internships. His career trajectory will likely be very different from his father’s.

“When I first started teaching, I pretty much had to go to a rural area for my first assignment,” he said. “My daughter will get a job in any of the primary schools in the metropolitan city where she lives.

“We need a whole-country approach to this issue because right now we’re just [teachers] from each other. In less preferred schools, the deficiencies increase further and we create more problems.”