The lesson planning time expected of Australian teachers would take an extra year of work, leading to widespread teacher burnout, a new report says.
Damning new Grattan Institute research shows a lack of curriculum detail and inadequate support is leaving many teachers drowning in a "near-impossible" amount of lesson planning.
It found less than a fifth of teachers have access to a common bank of pre-prepared high-quality curriculum materials for all their classes.
"Even more troubling, teachers in disadvantaged schools are only half as likely to have access to a common bank as teachers in advantaged schools," the report said.
The research said the gap created a disjointed "lesson lottery" where teaching quality varied from teacher to teacher and school to school, depending on the level of planning support.
"The current challenges are not due to a lack of effort on the part of teachers; [too] often they are left to do their best in near-impossible circumstances," the report said.
It suggests governments work with schools to develop high-quality, sequenced curriculum documents teachers can then adapt for their classes — a practice that is not widespread.
It said the move would help schools retain teachers and improve academic achievement.
YouTube to save time
Grattan Institute senior associate Amy Haywood, who co-wrote the report, said successive governments had left teachers to flounder without support.
She said governments had radically underestimated the amount of work — and the challenge — of taking "high level, very broad documents" such as the Australian Curriculum or state level curriculum and translating that into teaching and learning in the class.
The research found a high school teacher responsible for four different classes would need 2,000 hours, or a year working full time, to adequately plan their lessons from scratch.
"If they do it within their working hours during term, they'd never have stepped foot inside a classroom," she said.
Ms Haywood said that often meant teachers were scrambling for resources on unvetted sites like YouTube and teacher resource sharing hubs.
'The curriculum-planning challenge'
The research found the scramble to plan lessons also impacted learning outcomes.
The paper said 90 per cent of teachers surveyed "always" or "frequently" felt like they do not have enough time for high-quality lesson planning.
Whistleblower teachers speak outThe problem was particularly acute in schools with a higher proportion socio-economically disadvantaged students.
"Teachers in disadvantaged schools are half as likely to have access to those kind of materials for their classes [compared to] teachers in advantaged settings," the report said.
"Disadvantaged schools tend to have the highest rates of beginning [or student] teachers, out-of-field teachers [like a PE teacher taking a maths class], and teacher turnover.
"All of these factors increase the curriculum-planning challenge for individual teachers and schools."
Time to focus on delivery
Western Australia's Serpentine Primary is one school that has found a better way.
Principal Kendall Lange said when he arrived at the school in Perth's outer suburbs, teachers were doing their own planning and resource creation.
The school was also underperforming, compared to similar schools, so it sought to shake things up.
Over a number of years it developed a full suite of detailed lessons for teachers.
Mr Lange said instead of having to create the resources and the curriculum, teachers could "just focus on their delivery".
Not only did the environment become more collaborative, but NAPLAN results shot up, he said.
"Within our first three years, we had our students performing three deviations above the expected level."
'20 million hours a year could be saved'
The researchers want governments to invest in creating and distributing detailed lesson sequences to schools.
Ms Haywood said as well as helping schools improve results and retain teachers, substantial savings could be made in the long run.
"It's a lot less expensive for governments to invest in these kind of high-quality curriculum materials that go down to that lesson level than it is for us to expect individual teachers to do it all on their own," she said.
"Across all Australian teachers, that's about 20 million hours a year that could be saved."
The research showed this approach would be more than 200 times more cost effective than the status quo.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said he was keen to discuss the report when he meets with state and territory counterparts in December.
"If we get this right, this has the potential to really reduce the workload on teachers," he said.
