Deputy Premier and Minister for Education Ben Carroll said the State Government will begin implementing several recommendations of the Independent Review into Teacher Administration.
The review, commissioned this time last year, intended to look at administrative and compliance activities in public schools, and their impact on teacher, support staff and principal workload.
Led by Think Forward Educators CEO Katie Roberts-Hull, a former teacher and education expert, when the review was announced, Carroll said Roberts-Hull was a fitting choice for the taskforce.
“Ms Roberts-Hull is uniquely suitable to lead the review due to her combination of public policy and education expertise, her experience as a former teacher, and her independence from government,” he said in May last year.
Roberts-Hull was supported in her role by an expert reference group of principals, teachers, business managers and school support staff.
Peak principal organisations and unions, including the Australian Education Union, also played a key role in contributing to the review.
It found seven main issues and made 28 recommendations to reduce paperwork for school staff.
“We are working to make real, lasting changes that will support rewarding teaching careers – because that’s what’s best for our children,” Carroll said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Our teachers and school staff are some of the best in the country – we want to support them to spend less time on paperwork and more time in the classroom.”
The Government is continuing to consider many of the recommendations, but will implement the following from day 1, Term 1, 2026:
- Recommendation 2: Track administration and compliance workload and set improvement targets
- Recommendation 11: Streamlining individual student learning, health, and wellbeing plans for 2026
- Recommendation 12: Remove ‘recommended’ Individual Education Plan guidance
- Recommendation 13: Simplify semesterly reporting
- Recommendation 16: Simplify and reduce travel applications for 2025
- Recommendation 18: Provide administrative support for teacher teams
A new ‘Operational Teaching Assistant’ will also be trialled from the second half of this year with the aim of helping teachers with admin tasks, including collecting notes and payments, collating learning materials, and entering data.
The Government said some improvements are already in place, such as a program to save teachers time writing OHS reports, a hub to help with financial and payroll admin and access to ready-to-use lesson plans which are saving teachers time planning quality lessons.
Increasingly in Victoria's schools and nationally, more teachers are adopting AI tools in their classroom, as governments direct funding into piloting AI programs in schools to help reduce workload.
For example, the federal and WA governments are co-funding a $4.7 million pilot program in WA using the technology at eight Catholic, independent and public schools to help reduce admin workloads for teachers by supporting things like drafting lesson plans and suggesting learning activities aligned to the national curriculum.
The pilot drew on consultation with teachers, principals and deputies, school support staff, peak bodies and unions and is part of the Commonwealth’s $30 million Workload Reduction Fund under the National Teacher Workforce Action Plan, which education ministers agreed to in December 2022.
WA Minister for Education Tony Buti said teachers need to be teaching kids.
“To do this, unnecessary administrative burdens must be reduced, and we hope this new pilot program can support our teachers and ease their workload,” he said.
Dr Jo Blannin, a senior lecturer at Monash University School of Education, Culture and Society, said in Victoria, as in all states and territories, there are a large number of teachers teaching out-of-field or in a field they haven't been in for many years.
"These teachers are using generative AI to explore teaching concepts, to refresh themselves or to relearn from scratch, Blannin said.
“Teachers are also looking to generative AI to help them with what they call ‘drudge work’, such as paperwork or admin tasks.
While these tasks, Blannin explained, are highly valued at certain levels in schools, they take a great deal of time and energy, so teachers are trying to use generative AI to plug the gap.
So far it's been something of a success, with a long way to go.
“We’ve found that using AI actually increased teachers’ workload in the initial stages, as teachers grapple with complex questions around its use, such as how its output should be critiqued or which language models are suitable for which situations,” Blannin said.
