Led by Associate Professor Babak Dadvand from La Trobe University, the research exposes the ‘inward spiral’ that occurs when a school is gripped by a teacher shortage: when vacancies go unfilled, workloads rise across the board, school culture erodes, and more teachers opt to leave, serving to deepen the shortfall even more.

The impact on principals – and indeed entire school communities – is profound, the study warns.

Dadvand suggests that principals in these schools have been handed an impossible and unfair problem to solve, one which is beyond their influence, despite their best efforts to plug staffing gaps and create conditions that attract and retain staff.

“I think there is sort of a quiet assumption that good school leadership can fix the (workforce) problem,” he tells EducationHQ.

“Or there is an expectation perhaps that good leadership can absorb some of these more structural issues around the workforce.”

Drawing closely on five school case studies from across Victoria, researchers have concluded that while short-term policy responses such as permission-to-teach pathways, targeted incentives and casual relief do help to keep people in front of classes, they fall well short of addressing broader problems to do with workload, housing, pay, mentoring and community-service conditions.

These structural problems are really at the root of the predicament for hard-to-staff schools, the study indicates.  

“Many of the strongest drivers of shortage sit beyond the school gate: interstate pay differences, housing availability and affordability, inequitable funding, and limited local services,” the study flags.

One principal said for 12 consecutive terms her school was still running despite having between 12 and 24 staff vacancies, representing up to 24 per cent of the total staff cohort.

She noted one of her teachers opted to cross the border into a neighbouring state and pocketed an immediate pay rise without needing to relocate.

Another was relying on international teachers, with approximately a quarter of teaching staff on visas. Meanwhile, a $9000 school-funded incentive didn’t draw in a single application.

“If I didn’t have international teachers, the school wouldn’t be open ... I’ve spent nearly $3 million this year on CRTs just to staff the school,” the principal reported.

One principal noted their school's science and maths faculties were being led by permission-to-teach teachers. “So, it’s often the blind leading the blind here,” they said. 

Dadvand says it was evident that the school leaders were in an ‘almost impossible’ position and under a ‘tremendous amount’ of stress as a result.

Students also suffered as a consequence of staff shortages, he notes, with the quality and the continuity of their education hindered.

As one principal in the study reflects:

“Talking to a Year 9 student… you’ve had five English teachers at Year 9 because people are agency staff, maybe Irish, maybe backpackers who are just moving through the system.

“It is extremely disheartening. Now we’re seeing three years of that and that is now being reflected in what’s happening at the senior college as well, with regard to attitude, with regard to aspiration, with regard to what’s the value of education.”

One school leader said their science and maths faculties were being headed up by permission-to-teach (PTT) teachers.

“So, it’s often the blind leading the blind here,” they commented.

The concern raised by principals was not PTT itself, but the way an emergency reliance on it can become normalised when there was no alternative.

The study warns that when used in this way, PTT risks compounding ‘expertise dilution’ and creating a mentoring burden, further exhausting experienced teachers.

The consistent churn of inexperienced staff coming into the schools creates a cascading effect on the workloads of existing teachers and school leaders, the study found.

“Experienced teachers are expected to mentor, again and again, year after year, a form of ‘Groundhog Day’ professional development that exhausts precisely the people most capable of sustaining institutional knowledge and culture,” researchers warn.

One principal said at least 50 per cent of her job was taken up with early career teacher support.

“You just know that you are leaning on people who are working really, really hard, sometimes beyond what their experience is, and it affects retention, it affects culture, and keeping that culture is really, really tricky,” another said of the situation.

Research from 2024 shows that it is no longer early career teachers who are most likely to depart hard-to-staff schools, but rather those in their mid-career years.

It’s clear that principals are at the coalface “dealing with lots of structural issues that policy has failed to address so far”, Dadvand argues.

And yet principals in hard-to-staff schools have worked in creative and deliberate ways to attract staff and to keep them.

Firstly, it’s crucial to support new staff immediately and consistently; do not wait for problems to surface, they say.

Also protect experienced staff from unsustainable mentoring loads by building release time into timetables, and celebrate any small wins intentionally.

“Recognition costs nothing and shapes whether teachers stay,” the study notes.

“You need to do it straight away. You don’t have one or two years to build those relationships.

“So (be) visible, getting into staff offices, getting into staff classrooms, getting into the staffroom and always talking to staff, but just as importantly, also listening to staff,” one principal advises.

Several principals also shared a growing recognition that a school cannot be genuinely ‘student-centred’ if it is not simultaneously staff-centred.

On this front the study highlights that the Department of Education’s student-centred policy framing cannot hold up in a school that has no stable staff to sustain it.

“The Department does not see that there is a connection between teacher shortage and students turning up or feeling that school is of
value," one principal said. 

Dadvand says principals are also up against a largely mobile workforce, with better resourced schools an appealing option for many teachers.

“I think it’s a challenge that many principals in hard-to-staff schools are dealing with, so they’re not bleeding staff out to other schools who might be better resourced and more attractive...”

The study recommends the Government:

  • close inter-state teacher pay gap for border communities;
  • declare teacher retention in hard-to-staff schools a social equity priority;
  • create cross-portfolio taskforce linking education, housing, health, and community services; and
  • fund a dedicated hard-to-staff schools workforce stream with concrete target.

“Principals really do engage in creative ways of addressing [staffing] issues within their settings. They can redistribute resources within their remits. They can create cultures of belonging, which a lot of principals (in our study) were actively engaged with,” Dadvand says.

“But then there are broader issues and structural problems that they cannot fix – if there is housing problem or housing affordability or lack of infrastructure, inadequate funding.

“These are not the issues that principals on their own can really deal with.”