The school bell rings and the halls fill with yelling and scuffling as a mass movement of teenagers makes its way along a corridor.
"You've got assembly, folks. Let's go," says the principal, Grant, as he ushers a group of senior stragglers out the door.
When the last student is gone and the halls are quiet, Grant turns into a lilac-coloured cinder block office. Hunched over a desk, his head teacher Scott pores over the day's timetable.
"How did we [go] with cover for today?" asks Grant.
"I've just had another one call in sick," says Scott. "I'm going to have to try and pull some magic and find someone to cover period one.
"But we're looking extremely busy today."
This regional NSW high school is 12 teachers short on this mid-May day — almost a quarter of its teaching staff.
"Maths is uncovered. Year 12 English is uncovered," says Scott. "Year 12 SLR is uncovered."
"A lot of those kids had double maths yesterday afternoon too without a teacher. So they missed out again today," says Grant.
The timetabling nightmare unfolding at 9:03am on the third floor of this high school is occurring in varying degrees across Australia as schools struggle to come to terms with crippling teacher shortages.
Teaching shortages in rural NSW ongoing
In NSW, rural and remote areas have always struggled to fill their full allocation of teachers. And, in the past, these shortages have occasionally crept into patches of south-west Sydney.
But today, schools from Bondi to Broken Hill are struggling to put teachers in front of classes, and career educators in NSW and across the country say they've never seen anything like it.
The reasons for shortages and where they are felt most in New South Wales are varied. An older workforce, a drop in graduate teacher numbers and a growing student population form part of a complex picture.
There's consensus that not enough has been done to bolster the standing of the profession, and that the pay cap relative to other professions coupled with a backbreaking workload make teaching undesirable to school leavers. And then there are the effects of the pandemic, which has left an already-lean education system hopelessly exposed.
As Scott and Grant stare at their school's timetable, they realise there's no one to teach a year 8 art class that starts in 20 minutes. It will have to go to an English teacher who is in her last year of a teaching degree.
"I'll have to quickly duck down and get her lesson for her so that she can teach that in 20 minutes' time," says Scott.
Principal Grant says: "People need to know that there is a real issue and this is not something just to be swept under the carpet."
Strike the last resort
On a cool May morning two weeks earlier, a sea of angry public school teachers in red T-shirts builds in Hyde Park, Sydney.
"No teachers, no future!" they chant as they raise banners with their schools' names — Seaforth, Dapto, Cronulla, Braidwood Central School — ready to roll down Macquarie Street to NSW Parliament House.
Enterprise bargaining between the NSW Teachers Federation and government collapsed in December last year and now, teachers have taken to the streets.
Their demands include a meaningful response to the shortages, a pay rise greater than the capped 2.5 per cent and a reduction in workload.
A 2021 report by Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership says that more than half of the state's full-time teaching staff reported working on average 60 hours per week while only being paid for 36-40 hours.
It's only the second time teachers have gone on strike in a decade.
Many teachers are here because of what they see in their workplace and they're worried about their students.
"We're failing these kids at the moment, and that's horrible," Sarah, a teacher and union delegate from south-west Sydney who has asked us to change her name, says before the rally.
"Every period they have without a teacher, they feel less valued. Then they misbehave because they get worried you're not going to stick around. The more they test you, the more [staff] leave."
At the rally, she introduces her colleague, Lara, who is responsible for timetabling at their school. Lara asks to use a different name also — public school teachers need permission before speaking to the media.
But Lara can't contain herself.
Lara says she sees the impact playing out through increased truancy.
"If you are having day-to-day casuals and no set teacher with clear expectations who knows who you are," she says, "you're going to jig class".
Sarah says there's a constant juggle between the needs of HSC students and her school's most vulnerable kids and often, the most vulnerable are missing out. She's racked with guilt that she can't do more.
"A good education is a human right and we can't give it to them at the moment."
Not just in the regions
At a school in outer suburban Sydney, English teacher and local union branch treasurer Joel Wallington tells me how his school had 31 classes combined or under minimal supervision about a week after the rally.
Around 20 of those classes were year 12 students.
Joel says he looked after 65 students in the library that day.
He says four teachers quit that week. "We're losing some of even the most dedicated people, and the new people, who have come in and just gone 'No, this is too much'."
Soon after, Joel sent me a desperate Facebook plea from another school in south-west Sydney for more teachers to cover minimal supervision classes: "No lesson planning, no lesson prep, just keep an eye on them."
The NSW Department of Education's own internal advice has been warning about a shortage in certain subject areas for years. In 2020, internal documents warned that in the next five years, NSW would "run out of teachers" to match student enrolments and replace those retiring.
Department figures from last year showed public schools were down over 1,100 permanent full-time classroom teachers in October.
What minimal supervision looks like
On a day where Grant's regional school is short a dozen teachers — most sick with COVID — he shows me to a classroom where a year 12 English class sits discussing their weekends. Laptops are hurriedly opened as Principal Grant sticks his head in the door.
"You guys got a teacher today?" asks Grant. "No, we never have teachers," a student shoots back.
Grant explains that senior students are among the first to be put under minimal supervision because they can be safely left unsupervised where younger children can't.
As he leaves the room, Grant reflects that he taught the student who yelled out in year 8.
"A lovely kid and you can just see that she's disengaged in those lessons," he says.
"It was like, 'No, we haven't even got a teacher, no one cares about us'. That kind of attitude, which isn't fair, because we do care. Just wish we could do more."
Grant says that only around five to 10 per cent of students are highly motivated enough to do self-directed study.
Cohen is in year 11 at Grant's school and hopes to study radiology or physiotherapy after graduating.
Some weeks, Cohen says he'll have a couple of days in a row where he has multiple periods without a teacher.
His description of minimal supervision classes sounds like a kind of glorified babysitting, where a teacher explains the work the class is expected to do, then leaves.
"You get a bit carried away, because there's no teacher there."
Cohen says his classmates sometimes stream American basketball games online while the teacher's away. Then, when the teacher returns five minutes before the end of lesson to ask where their work is, they haven't done it.
He says he blames himself for his lack of motivation. The missed classes are starting to affect his performance, he says, so his mother is now trying to fill in the gaps at home.
"We had a test a couple of weeks back … and I'm normally pretty good at maths, but I had no idea what was going on."
Cohen says if he doesn't get enough marks to get into radiology or physiotherapy, he'll stay in town and hopes his father can help him find a trade.
"I guess it becomes who you know, from there," he says.
'This isn't sustainable'
The story of how it got this bad is in part the story of Simon's career. He's a teacher at Grant's school and has asked us to change his name.
When Simon started teaching in the early 2000s, teacher shortages were mostly concentrated in the regions. His first three years of teaching were at a rural school and he remembers them fondly.
Despite a bit of overtime, the workload was manageable. But he says that around 2012, that started to change as new policies and syllabi saw the admin work increase, which by 2014, had become unbearable.
When COVID arrived, already stretched teachers found themselves having to adapt lessons and to engage students and their parents in new styles of learning.
When kids returned to class, teachers found themselves covering for sick colleagues and juggling a raft of student welfare problems. Burnout pushed some teachers into leaving or early retirement.
By the end of 2020, Simon feared his school wouldn't be able to fill its staff.
Then, in 2021, the NSW government inadvertently made the stress on schools worse. To tackle kids slipping behind through lockdowns and remote learning, the Department of Education introduced the COVID Intensive Learning Support Program, or COVID ILSP. It relied partly on casual teachers as tutors.
An internal Department of Education document seen by Background Briefing shows almost the entire 2021 casual supply buffer was depleted by the COVID ILSP and increased sick leave. Teachers that many schools relied on to fill staff shortages and short-term and unplanned leave had been hoovered out of the system.
Casual teachers from the coast who previously would have come to Simon's school seeking permanency now had stable tutoring work in their area.
That program has been defended by deputy secretary for school performance at the NSW Department of Education, Murat Dizdar.
"I think it's a meritorious initiative and program. It's been welcomed by schools," he said.
"But I acknowledge some have spoken to me about the challenge of needing to use some of that workforce to cover the gaps in the full-time equivalent workforce."
Mr Dizdar says he supports that move.
At the start of 2022, Simon's school was five full-time teachers short. Grant managed to fill three of those positions by term two. Then their town was hit by COVID.
Other states suffering too
Simon and Grant's predicament is playing out in schools across Australia. National principals' associations and teachers' unions in every other state and territory report their schools are struggling too.
Career educators say COVID has exposed fault lines in the system.
The number of people choosing to study teaching is falling. Only around half of those who start an undergraduate teaching degree finish it. And 59 per cent of teachers are thinking of leaving.
Mark Grant, CEO of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, says some teachers have left for pandemic-related reasons: they didn't want to be vaccinated. Other teachers report colleagues leaving because they had underlying health conditions or were nervous about being in a high-transmission environment. But these are recent developments.
Mr Grant says rising real estate prices, a salary plateau for teachers in NSW after their 10th year and a crushing workload have made teaching a less attractive profession. And in some places, where the population is growing, the demand for teachers just hasn't been able to be met.
He says there is no national approach to addressing these challenges. "We need a better match between the demand side for the teachers of tomorrow and the supply side that universities are being paid nearly $800 million to provide," says Mr Grant.
"And at the centre of that relationship between demand and supply is the ability of 4 million students to have an appropriately qualified, high-quality teacher in front of them every day."
Principal Grant writes a letter
In February, Principal Grant decided to write a frank letter to parents and carers, outlining the vacancies in food technology, science, maths, PDHPE and languages and precisely how the school would cover each class.
Some classes would be covered by the librarian and the careers advisor and some would be put under minimal supervision, mostly by deputies and the Principal in the playground.
He decided to run it by his bosses at the NSW Department of Education. A department executive rewrote chunks of it.
Grant had told parents that sometimes the kids on minimal supervision will end up in the playground instead of being taught in a classroom. But someone from the department had written: "Minimal supervision does not mean that students miss out on a lesson".
The definition of "minimal supervision" had been amended to match the definition provided by the Minister for Education in parliament. Grant's list of temporary arrangements for each class had been removed entirely.
Grant refused to send the rewritten letter to parents. "Because that is just outright lying to parents. And I don't do that. Sorry."
NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said in a statement to Background Briefing: "I do find it unacceptable that someone in the department requested changes to a letter to parents to prevent criticism of myself or the department."
The NSW Department of Education did not respond to written questions from Background Briefing before deadline.
'Massive disrespect for the profession'
Down the corridor from the year 12 minimal supervision classes, one of Grant's deputies, Rick, works quietly in his office.
He is trying to hold back his anger towards the department but it overcomes him.
"In all my [35] years of teaching, I've never seen anything as bad as this. It's starting to really affect the welfare of everyone within the school."
Rick sees the system failing his students — 20 per cent of whom are Aboriginal — and that enrages him.
Both Rick and Grant are explicit when asked whom they blame for the current malaise: "F***wits," Rick says.
"I just think there's this massive disrespect for the profession, right from the top all the way through," says Grant.
Government responds
Deputy secretary of school performance Mr Dizdar says the Department of Education doesn't shy away from the significant challenges in filling teaching positions. But he says it's a large system, with 92,000 teachers on the payroll, and that the vacancy rate given the size of the workforce is low, just 2.8 per cent.
Mr Dizdar listed a range of incentives to address the shortages, including a $125 million teacher supply strategy as well as a program to persuade mid-career professionals to switch into teaching. Teachers are already offered sizeable bonuses to relocate to rural and remote areas.
And recently, the department deployed staff from their district offices back into classrooms.
Grant says that some of these programs have been beneficial, but others, not so much.
"There is no one silver bullet that will create an untapped pipeline of teachers into any jurisdiction," says Mr Dizdar.
"This is a national challenge, an international challenge, that cuts across jurisdictions and goes to the standing of the teaching profession in the eyes of society."
The NSW Education Minister, Sarah Mitchell, was harsher in her assessment of the scale of the problem. In a statement, she wrote:
"Let's be very clear. We are operating a school system through a pandemic and a flu spike. Education systems and business across Australia and the world are experiencing the same challenge. What is different in NSW is that we have a union that acknowledges behind closed doors that this is a spike driven by illness absenteeism while publicly they weaponise it."
But the minister also acknowledged the nature of teaching has changed over time. To deal with that, she's directed the Secretary of the Department of Education to cut teachers' admin tasks by 20 per cent.
The minister agreed that merged classes aren't ideal but said they are better than learning from home.
"We know after two and half years of COVID that the best place for our students is to be at school."
'Will you stay?'
On a cool late autumn day, it's clear Grant is starting to doubt if even his most loyal staff will stick around. He puts a question directly to Simon.
"You originally come from the coast. If [your daughter] comes into high school and the teacher shortage still exists … will you stay?"
The room falls silent. Simon looks down. And then stumbles out an answer.
"Uh. It's certainly something that we would have to look at, ah… You know, loyalty… loyalty only goes so far," he starts.
"It's not fair on her.
"What's that going to mean for her later on in life? So, yeah, short answer is… probably not."
Grant understands. "Family always comes first," he says.
The question is turned back on Grant and his eyes moisten.
"I honestly don't know… I hope I can keep going," he says.
"I love my job. Absolutely love it… But as you said, work is really, really hard. And I don't mind working hard when you get outcomes, but when you work your backside off and the people around you are doing the same and the kids are still missing out…"
His voice breaks.
"That's hard to take."
