Victorian and Tasmanian government school teachers are stopping work this week after months of long negotiations over pay and working conditions stalled. This follows Queensland teachers striking last year.

Historically, teachers only strike as a last resort. It was 16 years between strikes for Queensland’s teachers and the last time for Victorian teachers was 13 years ago. So why are Australian teachers walking out on their jobs right now? 

It is not only about their pay.

The work of Australian teachers has intensified over the past decade. Every day Australian teachers are doing their best to meet the increasingly diverse needs of their students.

They are managing more complex student behaviour than ever before and spend considerable time and effort incorporating inclusive practices to support the growing proportion of learners with diverse needs. In addition, there has been a steep increase in administrative work. Wages appear to be going backwards while increases in workload go unrewarded. 

In interviews with teachers, we found that navigating the competing demands on time between their work and personal lives was another challenge faced by many teachers and was experienced disproportionately by women.

Current conditions mean that teaching is no longer the family-friendly role it once was. Women make up around three quarters of Australia’s teacher workforce and while they are working long hours trying to meet the demands of their role, they still carry the lion’s share of caring responsibilities in their home lives where they are depended upon to care for children and the elderly.

Strategies for reconciling the demand often comes at the expense of their wellbeing, such as skipping or working through meals and marking late into the night.

A substantial body of research has examined the experiences of early-career teachers (those in their first five years), but less is known about teachers in their mid and late career stages and who make up the majority of the profession - a stage of career and life where the demands on women are often exacerbated.

Our research at Monash University’s Education Workforce for the Future Impact Lab has revealed that only around 30% of mid-career teachers intend to keep teaching until they retire. When these teachers leave the loss to the profession is profound. Students lose highly skilled educators who have spent years honing their craft and their less experienced counterparts lose mentors.

Mid and late-career teachers value their capacity to make meaningful contributions to learners and the community. But many feel undervalued, a sentiment echoed by findings published in the recent Teaching and Learning International survey. 

The excessive workload challenges consistently faced by teachers,  are resulting in burnout. The excessive workload is a significant contributing factor in teacher’s decisions to leave the profession. However, our research also revealed that many mid-career teachers were experiencing something else - demoralisation. 

We know that most teachers enter the profession with altruistic intentions; they want to make a positive difference to the lives of their students and school communities. Demoralisation is defined as a state beyond burnout. It stems from a mismatch between a teachers’ inherent moral commitment to their profession and the limitations of conditions in which they work. It often comes from a teachers’ lack of moral agency in the face of the huge demands of their role. When demoralisation peaks, teachers can no longer keep giving to a system which many experience as undermining their efforts to work with students in moral and ethical ways.

What we are seeing this week, as many teachers across Australia participate in strike action, is teachers standing up for themselves and their profession. They are asking for working conditions that enable them to do the work they care about in order to support the students that they teach.