The invisible many: why aren't we managing and developing replacement teachers?

Professor Anna Sullivan, co-director of the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion at the University of South Australia, says many beginning teachers are choosing insecure work because, while they love teaching, they want to avoid everything else that comes with longer term appointments.

“… what we’re finding is we’ve been conducting interviews with teachers, and initially there’s a lot of teachers saying they don’t want more permanent work because they don’t want the workload and the pressures that go with that,” Sullivan tells EducationHQ.

“So there’s something wrong…”

Sullivan says part of the issue, at least in the government sector, rests at the feet of prospective employers.

“If you look at other jobs now, they’re wooed – they’re wooing them really, really, really seriously to come in.

“They call it a ‘psychological contract’ so that you buy in, you love your employer, you love your workplace and you want to stay there and that you’ll work really hard through however long you’re there for.

“And I’m not sure that we’re seeing that with education departments.”

Sullivan, an expert in teacher retention and early career teachers, says a prevalence of new teachers choosing this initial path is a major concern, particularly given the system-wide neglect of casual and replacement teachers.

She and her team have been undertaking a literature review of all the international research on casual teachers (relief/substitute teachers) and found there are very few studies (less than 20) that have been undertaken.

With 16 per cent of Australian teachers employed casually and 12 per cent employed on fixed-term contacts under one year (termed ‘replacement’ teachers) it’s a concerning knowledge gap.

Replacement teachers often fill in for those on annual or long-service leave, and for a range of reasons they are missing out on critical induction or orientation information.

Some countries such as Denmark and Finland, provide longer term work agreements, where a teacher might be employed for a year with the understanding that they don’t have their own class, but fill needs wherever they might occur and have the security of knowing they’re being paid for the duration of the agreement.

Sullivan says Australian policies and guidelines largely ignore the development of replacement teachers and as a nation we rely far too heavily on schools to assume responsibility for their human resource management.

Given a disproportionate number of replacement teachers are early in their careers, they require more support, nurturing and development.

“It’s not just about hiring the right teacher to backfill someone else, it’s also about developing them, making sure they’re engaged with your workplace, that you’re developing the right way, they know the school’s policies, all of those sorts of things,” Sullivan contends.

“Because it’s a profession, you’re also supporting them to work towards the standards and receiving the right training and all of that.”

Sullivan believes that more than simply being provided with orientation – here’s your class, this is the subject, these are your duties – replacement teachers need to be socialised, connected, trained and developed.

Given the significant amount of time that children are learning under replacement teachers over their whole education, if as a system they’re being employed in such precarious ways, Sullivan contends it often means they’re not being developed, and therefore for kids, “that’s not a great outcome either”.

Analysing the AITSL guidelines, Sullivan says they fall well short of what should be offered to replacement teachers.

“It’s focussed on orientation - here’s your class, this is what job you need to do today, what duties and so on,” she says.

“But when you look at human resource management, it should be more than that - it’s socialising them in, making sure they’re well connected, it’s about the training and the development to develop quality teachers.

“And those guidelines are remiss, really, because they still put a lot of pressure on a school principal who may or may not know that they’re going to employ that teacher because of the way they’re employed to develop them. And that’s not OK.”

Moving forward, in terms of the government sector, Sullivan says systemic oversight is something that can be developed and improved.

While governments must ensure an adequate supply of teachers and thus, oversee the development and management of very large workforces, they should extend their focus to replacement teachers, which is critical to not only schools functioning effectively but also to student learning.

Some states and territories have devolved more power and responsibility to school principals, she says, so that they can recruit and manage their own staff.

“That works, possibly, where staff have longer term secure work, but then it means that those school principals are supposed to be developing this 28 per cent of the workforce (of casual and replacement teachers) - so that’s not going to work.

She says the system has to start taking that responsibility on and a starting point is looking at 'who is the employer'? Is it the school or is it the system? How can that be rethought?

“It’s also who’s going to look at the onboarding side of it? Who’s going to look at the socialisation side of it? And who’s going to look at the professional training side of it?

“Because casual teachers in Australia, in terms of the requirements for the standards, could go forever and never meet them because there’s just not a structure around them to be able to meet the standards properly.”

Professionalising the replacement teacher workforce and taking them more seriously is absolutely imperative, the academic advocates.

“At the moment, the little research that is there, shows that they feel invisible.

“It’s all about who you know rather than how good you are, whether you’ve been available or not, how responsive you are to a text message.”

Sullivan says we could look to other countries’ successful employment models, and in some cases we already are.

“We know anecdotally it is happening in Australia where regions, particularly rural areas, might struggle to find, say, a casual relief teacher and they have an arrangement where they’ve employed someone and they are moved around in different ways.

“So their work is more ongoing in the sense that they know they’ve got work, but they’re just not quite sure where they’ll be backfilling. So we can think about it more strategically.”

Far from pessimistic about the future, Sullivan says she is buoyed by research coming out now, mainly from Australia.

“Australia is leading the world really in the research on teachers and retention … and we do see some shifts in some of the policy documents. Casual teachers are mentioned in the AITSL’s latest documents, for example.”

The researcher would love to see policymakers and system leaders consult them now, particularly given how long research often takes to be published.

“We’ve done the research, we’re still writing about it - so if they want to move and become a bit more agile, they’ll probably need to engage with us a little bit more closely.”