My name is Lily Madden and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Carguttin woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily os. It's Friday, the third of November. I'm Sam, I'm Zara. A new government campaign is trying to inspire a new generation of teachers.
Teaching really does give so much more back than you actually give out.
But when we asked our TDA audience what they thought of it, the message came through loud and clear.
The problem isn't attracting teachers. You've got enough teachers. It's retaining teachers.
So will this campaign bring new teachers to the profession and is enough being done to stop them from leaving? We'll let you know in today's deep dive. But firs Ara Prime Minister Anthony Aberanzi's back on a plane tomorrow.
He is this time he is off to China. And it's going to mark the first visit to China by an Australian PM since twenty sixteen. It's also fifty years since Scoff Whitlam became the first Australian Prime Minister to travel to China in nineteen seventy three. While there, Albinizi will meet with Chinese President Chi Jimping in Beijing for talks, and he'll also attend an international import exhibition in Shanghai.
The four day visit comes after China scrapped financial penalties on several Australian imports in the last twelve months.
The federal government will expand a specialist family violence hotline for First Nations boys and men. The Brother to Brother hotline provides twenty four to seven culturally safe support for males struggling with issues around relationships, parenting, and drug and alcohol use. It was previously only open to First Nations men aged eighteen to twenty five, but will now be accessible to boys as young as ten.
Kmart has been fined one point three million dollars that's for breaching Australian spam laws. An investigation from the National Communications Regulator found that Kmart sent over two hundred thousand marketing emails to unsubscribed customers between July twenty twenty two and May twenty twenty three. The action from the national regulator follows similar measures against door Dash, Uber and Tickertech.
And Today's Good News. Sorry just near sneeze, which wouldn't be an issue in Queensland, which is rolling out their free flu vaccine program for another year in twenty twenty four.
The most painful dad joke You've ever made.
It follows the successful vaccine rollout last year and this year, when almost one million people received a free jab. The measure is aimed at reducing pressure on the public health system and providing cost of living support. Let'd say gives it a bit of a jab in the arm Czara. The government has a new ad campaign to recruit more teachers and it's all about inspiration.
Dear miss Luke, I just wanted to thank you for everything you have done for me. I was struggling pretty bad before you came to teach us. Not only do you look like one of my idols, you are one from Mila. It was just so potent, The fact that you can be someone's idol.
Beautiful.
Do you feel inspired after that, Zara.
I mean, like, I think that it's preaching to the converted because I wanted to be a teacher when I finished school because I loved you. Yeah, I love my teachers so much that I wanted to be a teacher.
But what we know from reporting on the teaching profession over the last couple of years is that it is going to take more than ad to get new teachers into the classroom and to keep them there. So we put this campaign in front of the TDA audience, and what we heard from teachers within tda's audience is that this isn't striking a chord.
Oh, I'm a name's Katrina. I'm a former teacher who left the teacher profession about a decade ago.
So Katrina is one of the people who commented on the post we put up earlier this week.
When I heard about the Gosh government initiative to be that teacher, I thought, the problem isn't attracting teachers. You've got enough teachers. It's retaining teachers.
And there were lots of comments like this. When we put the story on Instagram, there was stuff like, you know, I'm reading this with tears in my eyes as I know I will end up being a teacher who leaves the profession early. So I guess this initiative might be all about inspiring people to become teachers, but there's clearly a question to be asked here about what's being done to inspire teachers already teaching in classrooms.
Yeah, and I think that this goes to I mean, it won't be surprising to anyone that's listening who is in the teaching profession that there are some major issues in this industry exactly.
And what that has led to is a teacher shortage. And to give you a sense of the situation, the federal government says it expects from twenty twenty one to twenty twenty five that Australia is going to have foury one hundred fewer teachers than we actually need. And there are two problems to consider here. On one hand, there's more students to teach. Student numbers are booming. It's growing at about ten percent a year Australia wide. It's pretty quick.
And on the other hand, teaching numbers are falling and we don't have enough people entering teaching. So when we look at even people who have enrolled in a teaching degree, but then are completing their degree. The completion rate is falling by seventeen percent a year, so that's a pretty sharp drop off too. And we also have a big
problem of people wanting to leave teaching. There was this Monash University study last year of more than two thousand teachers and fifty nine percent of them said that they were thinking about leaving the profession. So that's a pretty big problem.
And so what is it about teaching that seems to be the issue here? Like why are we hearing these numbers, seeing these numbers? Why did our audience react owe strongly to this story?
So we go to look at another survey to try and understand the answer to that question. There was a survey of three thousand teachers and the survey asked those who said they were thinking of leaving the profession to list their reasons why. And the number one reason in that survey, nominated by seventy one percent of teachers was a heavy workload. Number two at sixty eight percent work life balance, so a similar theme. And then at number three with sixty one percent, the stress and the impact
on mental health. And it's fair to say this was a common theme for our audience too.
This is what Katrina said, the excessive workload, teachers having to mark assessments, write reports, communicate with parents, have meetings or after school hours, having to work, we can having to go to school performances as Stedfords, do all the extracurricular activities on top of you know, preparing lessons. It's just I'm not working seven days a week.
I feel like this is what comes up in every conversation I have with any friends in the profession, is that you know, from the outside, people think that teachers work nine to three, that you know, they get these very long school holidays, that it's somehow this very easy profession when there is so much being done outside of hours, and there's so much preparation and so much after hours, that you know, the workload just seems insurmountable for so many.
Putting that aside for a second, were there any other reasons that teachers were giving as to why they were turning away from the profession.
Yeah, there's a variety of other reasons. There's things like insufficient pay that was reported by thirty percent of respondents, twenty eight percent mentioned class sizes being too large, and twenty six percent said it was about challenges with student behavior on.
The daily, dealing with students who firmly appease you, physically step into your own personal space and threaten you, walk out of classrooms, ignore you. It's actually so horrible and it wouldn't happen in any other workplace, but unfortunately it happens ouri within an educational setting.
And so I guess the point that emerges here is that for different teachers, the problems are different, but there is this general feeling that the education system is in a state where it's going to need much more than a single ad campaign to get it back on track.
Yeah, I mean pretty clear that there is an issue there. Perhaps one ad campaign won't solve at all. What is the government trying to do to address this teacher shortage?
So last year federal, state, and territory government's got together to produce this plan to address the shortage. This is Federal Education Minister Jason Clair speaking after that meeting about the government's three key focuses.
One, what are the.
Things that we can do to encourage more people to become teachers? What sort of national coordinated action can we take on that front? Secondly, what can we do to prepare student teachers for the workforce they're about to enter. And thirdly, what do we do to keep the fantastic teachers that we already have.
So governments are tackling this crisis in a number of ways, including improving teaching courses so that means more funding for university places and for scholarships, as well as reviewing how
teaching is actually being taught at universities. There's an underlying commitment to addressing teacher workloads, so you know, reviews of looking into how to cut down on unnecessary work taken on by teachers, also by admin staff, things like report writing, unpaid extracurricular activities, and also ways to help teachers with lesson planning, so giving better resources to teachers to sit alongside the national curriculum. Now, it's worth mentioning that these
are all quite theoretical so far. The Action Plan was released last December and it's really more of an aspirational guide for how governments want to approach the issue. But it is certainly recognition from all levels of government that there is a problem here. So Zara, having had this chat today and watching that campaign together, why did you want to go into teaching and has that changed.
Look, I think the reason that I wanted to go into teaching was that I truly thought that I had an exceptional time at school and through my education system, and that I thought that I wanted to give other people the opportunity to have access to the type of you know, learning that I did and the type of teachers that I did. I think it is an incredibly, incredibly difficult career that is oftentimes glossed over and I
think misunderstood, especially the workload that comes with it. And I certainly didn't appreciate that at school, let alone, you know, when I was considering what to study at university. I think, in a way, what we do now, in my mind, kind of ticks the box of teaching. I feel like I wanted to teach to be able to like start conversations with students in the way that my teachers did
and the way they supported me. And I do feel like, hopefully through the daily ods, I do get that avenue, even if it's you know, not in a formal kind of classroom setting. And I do still think that there is an element of teaching that we're doing here, So just.
A bit less marking though.
A bit less, just comment sections and dms to deal with, so basically the same. But I think that, yeah, the essence is the same. And all I'd say is that I'm grateful for the amazing teachers I had. I know that one of them, Misstang, listens to this, so hello, and that yeah, we should always be grateful for our teachers, and especially for those who are heading into a career that you know, we know that there is a problem, but hopefully they can all be part of the change together.
That's all we've got time for on today's episode of The Daily Odds. If you learn something from this episode, you can keep the conversation going. Maybe you've got a teacher in mind that you can send this to, or you can throw this link in your mate's group chat. We'll be back again on Monday morning. Have a great weekend.