One in three educators are losing teaching time due to disruption, with experts calling for more to be done to address rising rates of poor behaviour in Australian classrooms.
According to the OECD’s disciplinary climate index, Australian classrooms are among the world’s most disorderly, affecting teacher safety and work satisfaction and school-leaving results.
Australia is one of just four countries, including New Zealand, Finland and Canada, in which students do not report a favourable disciplinary climate and ranks 69th out of 76 OECD countries overall – well behind other developed economies and school systems.
On Tuesday, the federal government announced a $3.5m suite of resources to help teachers reduce classroom disruption, adding it was pushing teachers out of the system and affecting the learning ability of students.
The education minister, Jason Clare, said he had received advice from teachers that “when they leave university and jump into the classroom for the first time they don’t feel as prepared as they should to manage a classroom full of students”.
“When students are fully engaged … they learn at their best and teachers have more time to teach,” he said.
The resources, developed by the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) in consultation with teachers and the classroom management expert Dr Tim McDonald, include explainers and “best practice guides” to managing students.
It follows the release of a Senate inquiry’s interim report on increasing disruption in Australian school classrooms, which found the issue was contributing to poor literacy and numeracy results for young people and denying learning of essential foundational skills.
The report referenced increased physical abuse to teachers, including instances of sexual harassment, death threats, staff being struck, having furniture thrown at them, windows next to their heads punched in and cars keyed. Some cited PTSD from witnessing violent fights.
It made nine recommendations, including strengthening initial teacher education (ITE) programs, introducing a “behaviour curriculum” and investing in professional development including explicit teaching methods.
It also recommended future buildings be funded and constructed to “deliver the best learning environment for students”, including traditional rather than open-plan classrooms.
The Greens education spokesperson, Senator Penny Allman-Payne, said the party had been in opposition to the inquiry “from the outset”.
In a dissenting report, the Greens said rather than students being inherently badly behaved, the inquiry should have focused on socioeconomic and psychosocial challenges facing young people, including a failure of accommodation for disability.
“It’s no surprise that we’re seeing an increase in behaviours of concern in the classroom,” Allman-Payne said.
“Students are forced into an environment that is not inclusive, where the support and the resources they need do not exist, and it’s left to overworked teachers to try to hold it all together.
“The report’s focus on training and pedagogy really misses the point. We should be addressing the causes of disadvantage and properly resourcing our schools so that teachers have the time to plan properly and provide proper support to every student.”
The AERO chief executive, Dr Jenny Donovan, said reports from students and teachers showed time spent by principals and teachers on managing behaviour was placing a “substantial strain” on educators.
She said the guides would advise teachers on how to respond to poor behaviour and use skills such as voice control, circulating the classroom and non-verbal corrections.
Mentoring guides and support for school leaders would be released in the new year.
But a senior lecturer in Monash University’s faculty of education Dr Erin Leif said professional training was not enough.
Findings from a 2022 Monash survey found 24.5% of teachers felt unsafe at work, compared with 19% in 2019.
Leif said teachers were “overwhelmed” by the demands of managing student behaviour, which was contributing to teacher stress and burnout and the declining performance of Australian students in international tests.
“Recommendations about ways to establish and strengthen systems within schools were largely absent from the report and its recommendations. Moving forward, providing additional guidance to schools on ways to establish these systems will be important.”
In its submission, the Australian Professional Teachers Association (APTA) noted frequent collapsed classes were leading to “high levels of disruption”, citing multiple classes being placed into common areas with minimum supervision and a lack of structure due to workforce shortages.
According to the National Centre Against Bullying, each year almost 25% of Australian students – about 910,000 people – experience bullying while at school.
The Australian Education Union’s federal president, Correna Haythorpe, said focusing on ITE resources failed to address the complex issues affecting teaching and learning in schools – including the historical underfunding of the public system.
“The report frames behaviour as a problem for teachers in a simplistic manner by focusing on student discipline and narrow one size fits all approaches,” she said.
“It fails to address the fundamental issues that can lead to disruption such as the lack of individual support for students, lack of specialist support staff or learning programs and increasingly large class sizes in our schools.”
Haythorpe said explicit instruction methods and changing classroom setups were “one size fits all approaches” that would not fix a funding deficit.
