Triage in teaching: the nature and impact of workload in schools

ABSTRACT

The work of teachers is often understood primarily in relation to student learning rather than as a form of labour for the worker in question. While such a focus is understandable, it can fail to recognize the relationship between conditions of work and the character or nature of that work. In this article, we engage with the issue of teachers’ work and workload, presenting interview data from 31 teachers across the state of NSW, Australia. Locating these data within a devolved public education policy context, we argue that increased accountability primarily through paperwork and reporting requirements are operating to re-shape and re-define what it means to be a teacher, and what teachers “do”. Such demands are reported to have created a substantial workload increase across the board in our sample, leading to a perceived need for teachers to undertake “triage” in their work, leaving some – if not all – activities ultimately incomplete. We explore these tensions in the data and raise questions about the forms of labour teachers currently undertake in schools; why they do so; and whether such work is either desirable or sustainable.

KEYWORDS:

• Teachers
• work
• workload
• working conditions
• Australia

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to acknowledge the generous feedback of the reviewers, as well as the research assistance of Dr Mihajla Gavin and Dr Paul Kidson.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A central school is a school that provides education for both primary and secondary students. These are generally smaller schools and, according to the NSW Department of Education (2019c), are “characteristic of regional districts where the population is too small to support a single high school”.

2. The My School website now uses the categories of “Major Cities”, “Inner Regional”, “Outer Regional”, “Remote” and “Very Remote”. However, given the relatively small sample size of this study, filling all five of the new categories was not considered practicable, and thus we retain the earlier and broader categories of “Metropolitan”, “Provincial” (here including both “Regional” and “Outer Regional”) and “Remote” (here including both “Remote” and “Very Remote”).

3. The Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) is a measure of schooling advantage presented on the Australian My School website (www.myschool.edu.au). With a median of 1000, in this study, a “low-ICSEA” school had an ICSEA of less than 950; a “mid-ICSEA” school had an ICSEA of between 950 and 1050; a “high-ICSEA” school had an ICSEA of over 1050.

4. The term “executive” as used here is inclusive of all middle leader and senior leader positions, including deputy principal, assistant principal and head teacher roles. In NSW public secondary schools, head teachers are typically those who look after a particular subject area and its teachers.

5. NAPLAN is a national, standardized census test (Lingard et al., 2016) of literacy and numeracy for students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NSW Teachers Federation.

Notes on contributors

Meghan Stacey

Meghan Stacey is a lecturer in the sociology of education and education policy in the School of Education at UNSW Sydney, gaining her PhD from the University of Sydney in 2018. Her research considers the operation of dis/advantage in schooling contexts, and the role of education policy in shaping teachers’ work.

Rachel Wilson

Rachel Wilson is Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Sydney. She has particular expertise in educational assessment, research methods and program evaluation, with broad interests across educational evidence, policy and practice.

Susan McGrath-Champ

Susan McGrath-Champ is Associate Professor in Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney Business School. Her broad research interests include the geographical aspects of work and employment relations, with particular focus on school teachers’ work and working conditions.