Schools are struggling with staff retention and finding people to stand in front of a class.
Social media is lit up with chatter about the issue. “It’s not the pay that’s the issue, it’s the workload,” proclaimed one post this past week. The responses to that post were huge. “You nailed it. That is the issue.”
Teachers are so weighed down with administration that they barely have time to spend with their own children after a day in the classroom. Work-life balance? Teachers put in 50+ hours a week.
The crisis is reaching breaking point, not unlike the crisis we are seeing in our health system.
The Courier Mail published an article titled, “Plan to Boost School Staff.” Queensland’s educational experts had held a roundtable earlier in the week to brainstorm solutions to address and ease teacher and principal workloads.
One solution proposed by the roundtable is to bring teachers out of retirement.
“One key takeaway from the roundtable was the impact that unsustainable workload is having on teachers and principals, I have asked the Department to conduct a school staff survey to hear from staff about the types of tasks that are taking them away from their core business of teaching and learning of young Queenslanders,” said Education Minister Di Farmer.
In a recent study, Dr Paul Karnovsky of Curtin University found that administrative tasks for teachers had increased by 90% since 2018. Dr Paul Kidson of ACU has conducted similar studies. That figure is alarming!
To understand better, several months ago I asked the question on LinkedIn, “Teachers, what is your pain-point? What specifically is causing the administrative burden?” I received lots of comments that supported what I had seen happening while I was a school principal.
The primary administrative burdens cited were:
- The ‘test-heavy’ nature of teaching, often held under the guise of needing ‘raw data’ or developing ‘test readiness’ which puts students under needless pressure and is often a pointless exercise, not to mention the burden of marking it places on the teacher. The pressures placed on teachers and schools to perform on the standardised testing, i.e., NAPLAN, is a primary pressure.
- The prescriptive nature of a school’s curriculum delivery demands, driven by assessment deadlines. In the name of consistency teachers of the same subject or class have to be “up to lesson x by week y whether the students are there or not”. Teachers can no longer think for themselves and adjust the learning for their students because they must get through the content by week x.
- Meeting overload: One teacher told me they are now meeting before and after school. This was a redacted portion of an email the teacher had received illustrating the problem, “Dear staff, please be advised that due to the x meeting as well as the y meeting this morning, there will be no z meeting for staff this morning.”
- And the largest increase in administration, the requirements for the National Consistent Collection of Data brought on since the introduction of the NDIS. Teachers are not clear as to how much evidence they need to provide, so they typically provide more than needed. One teacher wrote to me and said, “the jurisdiction I work for requires teachers to collect four times the required data, every adjustment for every student with an Individual Learning Plan, every term. This is far more than the 10 weeks’ worth of evidence required by the Department of Education and equates to hundreds of hours of teacher time.”
A 90% increase in administrative workload since 2018. “Hundreds of hours of teacher time,” driven by the need to collect data. I am sorry, but bringing teachers out of retirement is not going to solve that problem. All this work by its nature, has to be performed by the classroom teacher.
At Vivedus we are keenly aware of the huge increase in teacher workload and the effects on staff wellbeing. We have been teachers too. The increase of stress and decline in teacher wellbeing has an enormous impact on student engagement, behaviour and learning. It is no wonder that our education system is in crisis.
The exciting news is that Vivedus is about providing solutions to this enormous issue. If Vivedus is to achieve its vision to transform education, then the first issue we have to tackle is teacher workload and bring back the joy of the job for those who love kids.
So just how does Vivedus reduce teacher workload?
Our SaaS, AI enabled platform makes life easier for teachers by tackling those four big issues identified by teachers.
The Planner module makes preparing for learning a breeze. Integrated with National Curriculum documents (ACARA vs 9) and each States’ senior syllabus, learning objectives appear in a drop-down box. There is no going back and forth between different documents and platforms to plan for learning. It’s all there in one place.
Built in Artificial Intelligence provides prompts and ideas to enhance the planning, great if you’re stuck for ideas.
As you populate your planning with simple drag and drop actions and helpful AI ideas, data is automatically transferred into the student reporting system, the Learner Profile. Assessment data is also automatically transferred to the student Learner Profile, making reporting far less onerous.
How much assessment do you need to carry out? Well, the platform helps with that too.
The Planner tool allows a teacher to collaboratively plan with colleagues online, not unlike Microsoft SharePoint. No need to find time to meet. Plan collaboratively in your own time, however you prefer.
The Vivedus Platform also has a Community of Practice where you can share and take other teachers’ planned units and adapt them for your own learners.
The Vivedus Platform is constantly gathering data behind the scenes and is integrated with a supercomputer, Ruby, at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. No more needless gathering of data, or duplication of data entry.
Further to this, the Planner is also a professional development tool supporting your growth to become Highly Accomplished (HA) or a Lead teacher. As you plan, you receive feedback through the system, and you are automatically building your own portfolio of evidence to support your application for HA or Lead. Your growth and love of teaching is Vivedus’ priority.
And perhaps the biggest reliever of pressure, the automatic collection of NCCD requirements and report.
Nothing is more frustrating and onerous for a teacher than having to find the adjustments for their students and manually enter them into their planning and then collate the evidence at NCCD time, never knowing how much is enough. And where is the source of truth for those adjustment needs? Schools are complex communities, and most do not have a single point of truth for student adjustments. Teachers end up being confused, and when they are unsure, they compensate by doing more. Well, Vivedus solves that problem.
The data for the Individual Learning Plans and required adjustments is stored in the Vivedus Platform. That data then automatically appears in your personalised planner. All a teacher needs to do is tag the adjustment they plan to use for their student. Done. The Vivedus Platform does the rest. It gathers all the adjustments and publishes the report needed for NCCD.
If the 90 percent of the administrative workload has been caused by NCCD requirements, then Vivedus believes that that single feature alone will see a massive administrative reduction for teachers. No need to bring out the retired teacher to do playground duty for you.
Vivedus is about transforming education by supporting teachers, engaging students in learning, and ensuring that they are equipped with the skills and dispositions to thrive in the AI era.
Ethan, please don’t leave the classroom. We want you to stay. Our young people need you.
