Speaking to EducationHQ on the condition of anonymity, the secondary teacher from regional Victoria says his classrooms are filled with a significant number of unmotivated and disinterested kids who have no desire to engage in the lesson at hand.
“I mean, it’s demoralising,” he says.
“I think it’s one of the biggest factors that’s probably leading to the attrition rate that we have.”
While clear improvements could be made to teachers’ workload and pay, the educator says it’s the lack of value many students have for their education that is by far the most defeating aspect of his job.
“In some cases, you’ll have a class of 25 kids, and none of them want to be there," the teacher says.
“You’re basically trying to force them to learn, and you just stand up there thinking, ‘why do I bother? Like, what is the point?’
“If the kids are not intrinsically motivated to the point where they’ll work without you standing over their shoulder, I mean, you feel more like a prison guard than a teacher at that point,” the teacher reflects.
Worsening school attendance rates across regional Australia have been flagged for concern in a recent Jobs and Skills Australia report, which found a growing proportion (15 per cent) of 18-24 year-olds outside our major cities have now disengaged from education, training or employment entirely.
Attendance rates for regional schools sat at 85.4 per cent in 2024 – below their pre-COVID level of 89.4 per cent in 2019.
By comparison, major cities recorded an 89 per cent attendance rate last year, the report noted.
The teacher suggests attendance data at his own school is telling.
“I have one particular Year 8 class where our average attendance for the class is 68 per cent. The Australian average is 88 per cent...
“And then the attendance level, which is the proportion of students attending 90 per cent of the time, is 22 per cent in that class. The Australian average level is 60 per cent.”
The figures are even more grim for elective subjects, but to have so many students regularly skipping core subjects is especially troubling, he suggests.
“When you have 22 per cent of kids meeting that baseline attendance level, it’s fairly hard to teach anything effectively.”
For those Year 8s that do show up for English lessons, a considerable number lack the foundational literacy skills they need to properly access the curriculum, the teacher says.
Many are sitting at a Grade 3 or 4 level, he adds.
“So, it’s not like they’ve even met that minimum (literacy) level to function in society. I think it’s a huge issue.”
The average classroom at one regional school now contains a “critical mass of students who are apathetic about their learning”, a teacher reports.
As a society we appear to have a serious problem with our attitude towards education and the value we place on it, the teacher argues.
And while unable to comment conclusively, he says sentiments of apathy – or even antipathy – toward schooling are particularly bad in regional areas.
“So regularly, you’ll be trying to communicate to a student why what they’re doing matters.
“And when you get back in return is, ‘Oh, my dad says I don’t need to listen to you guys, because I’ll probably work on the farm anyway, and it doesn’t really matter’.
“That’s the sort of attitude that you run into pretty frequently.”
In terms of students’ post-school aspirations and their motivation to pursue a career, the teacher says this varies markedly.
“But I’m also hearing more and more just from people in the community, that the students who are graduating are shocking [when they are] coming into the workforce.
“What I hear is they’re clueless and they don’t take instruction well, and all these things that employers have been very critical of.”
This comes back to the sizeable knowledge and skill deficit these young people graduate with, the teacher says.
“They might be right that they’re not going to be using trigonometry in their job, they’re not going to have to compose persuasive essays, but they’re not developing the sort of skills and the persistence that they’re going to need, wherever they go, because they’re just work refusing in a lot of cases.”
Many of the international students that come to the school have “really good, really positive attitudes” towards learning, the teacher notes.
Others do, too – but the influence of the disengaged soon dampens this, he adds.
“The thing that’s really sad to see is, it’s not the majority of kids whose parents say ‘school doesn’t matter, do whatever you want’.
“But it’s enough of those kids that it changes the atmosphere in the class and the school as a whole.
“Within a couple of months, [those with positive attitudes] realise that makes them stand out, and so they start adopting that attitude of, ‘I don’t care, this doesn’t matter’ as well to fit in.”
Thus the average classroom at the regional school now contains a “critical mass of students who are apathetic about their learning”.
“It affects everybody. It affects students that could easily have gone the other way,” the teacher laments.
Whole-school initiatives seeking to shift apathetic attitudes are probably futile, the educator argues.
Rather, this is a complicated societal issue that schools in many other countries are not dealing with – or at least not to the same extent, he says.
“As far as solutions, I think that we as a school have only a fairly limited influence on the values that the students have.
“I think a lot of it comes from society and then it comes from home, of course. It’s tricky. I would love to say that, ‘yes, a whole school initiative to just convince the kids that learning matters would be helpful’.
“But I don’t really think it would be. I think the students, if anything, would probably cringe and maybe get pushed further the other way. You can’t tell them something like that when it’s at odds with the value society places on education.
“You just end up sounding kind of ridiculous if you try.”
