Intensification of teachers’ work under devolution: A ‘tsunami’ of paperwork

Abstract

Australian public school teachers work some of the longest weekly hours among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, particularly in the state of New South Wales where average hours are officially in, or near, the statistical category of ‘very long working hours’. These reports of a high workload have occurred alongside recent policy moves that seek to devolve responsibility for schooling, augmenting teacher and school-level accountability. This article explores changes in work demands experienced by New South Wales teachers. As part of a larger project on schools as workplaces, we examine teaching professionals’ views through interviews with teacher union representatives. Consistent with a model of work intensification, workload increases were almost universally reported, primarily in relation to ‘paperwork’ requirements. However, differences in the nature of intensification were evident when data were disaggregated according to socio-educational advantage, level of schooling (primary or secondary) and location. The distinct patterns of work intensification that emerge reflect each school’s relative advantage or disadvantage within the school marketplace, influenced by broader neoliberal reforms occurring within the state and nation.

Keywords

Devolution labour process New South Wales paperwork teachers teaching work work intensification workload

Introduction

International comparative research indicates that Australian public school teachers work some of the longest weekly hours among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (Freeman et al., 2014: 122), and that teachers in New South Wales (NSW) work some of the longest hours among teachers in this country (McKenzie et al., 2014). An average of 50.2 hours of work per week for primary school teachers and 49.4 hours per week for secondary school teachers in 2013 places NSW teachers in or near the category of ‘very long working hours’ as per the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ definition of at least 50 hours of work per week (Williamson and Gardner, 2015). Moreover, the number of hours that teachers work in NSW and nationally has gone up over the last decade. Data from three ‘Staff in Australia’s Schools’ surveys commissioned by the Australian Federal Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, in 2006–2007, 2010 and 2013, show that the average total hours worked increased slightly for both primary and secondary teachers (McKenzie et al., 2014). This increase has coincided with new policies that increase accountability and devolve responsibility for student outcomes and school performance, which have led to a perception among teachers of an accelerated working life (Thompson and Cook, 2017).

As Findlay and Thompson (2017) note, work intensification – working longer and working harder – is one of the key elements of the contemporary nature of ‘demanding work’ that characterises numerous sectors and industries, including education. Peetz and Murray (2011: 14) observe that the issues of long working hours, work–life balance and work intensity have entered into the general public debate in Australia. Yet studies have found that public sector professionals, such as teachers, report higher levels of stress and work–life imbalance than private sector workers; furthermore, union members have reported a greater perception of work intensity, work–life imbalance and job stress (Johnson et al., 2005; Le Fevre et al., 2015). This article sets out to explore how public sector school teachers who are members of the New South Wales Teachers’ Federation (NSWTF or ‘Federation’) describe their own and their colleagues’ conditions of work and employment conditions, how these have changed and whether they consider these changes as being related to policy change. The article is structured into six main sections: the first outlines education policy in NSW in the context of wider changes in the Australian education system and provides an overview of the NSTWF; the second section presents key literature regarding work intensification, both in general and specifically related to teachers’ work and its analysis through labour process theory (LPT); and the third discusses the research method and analytical processes. The fourth section presents the findings of the research, first an aggregated and then a disaggregated level, to highlight commonalities and differences associated with the geographical, primary or secondary, and socio-educational contexts of teachers’ work, leading to fuller discussion in the fifth section. The article is concluded in the sixth and final section, which summarises the broader implications of these findings for policy and suggests directions for further research.

Background: NSW education policy and teacher unions

The nature of teachers’ work and working conditions has been affected by changes in education policy (Fitzgerald and Knipe, 2016; Fitzgerald et al., 2018; McGrath-Champ et al., 2019). The Australian policy context in education, as well as that of NSW, now reflects the governance reforms that have become commonplace among western nations (Ball, 2008; Connell, 2013; McKenzie et al., 2015; Niesche and Thomson, 2017). This reform agenda has worked variously and incrementally to shift political and social focus towards the level of the local school and its staff, across both ‘public’ and ‘private’ contexts (Stacey, 2018). This drive towards the local is manifested through devolution of responsibility for schooling, and it works in tandem with other governance technologies – test-based accountability policies, standardisation of teaching and learning, and corporate management models – which are working to turn the field of education into a market (Lingard et al., 2013).

In the state of NSW, reform in recent years has brought a renewed focus to devolution and marketisation policy previously associated with, for instance, the de-zoning reforms of the late 1980s (Considine, 2012; Sherington and Hughes, 2012). Current reforms such as Local Schools Local Decisions (LSLD) (Gavin and McGrath-Champ, 2016) have sought to devolve authority to school principals, while a focus on teacher quality has been evident in policies such as Great Teaching, Inspired Learning (Stacey, 2017). Documents such as these have worked in tandem – and at times in tension – with federal intrusions into education as evident in the Rudd/Gillard Labor government’s ‘Education Revolution’, which sought to encourage competition between schools through the publishing of literacy and numeracy results on the My School website (www.myschool.edu.au), and which was associated with a shift from a focus on quality teaching to more problematic questions of teacher quality (Mockler, 2013).

The five key features of the NSW LSLD policy, as identified by the NSW Department of Education (DoE), display aspects of New Public Management common to other recent devolutionary policies such as Western Australia’s 2009 Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative (Fitzgerald and Rainnie, 2012). Under broad strategies entitled ‘Staff in our schools’, ‘Managing resources’, ‘Working locally’, ‘Reducing red tape’ and ‘Making decisions’, the LSLD initiative sought to ensure school leaders (principals) had management credentials, had responsibility for managing the majority of the school education budget, had greater performance management requirements, and were provided with online tools to better manage their increased authority over staffing and finances (NSW Department of Education and Communities (DEC), 2014, 2017). Managerial leadership, as opposed to instructional leadership, was to the fore with important implications for teachers’ conditions of work and employment conditions (Gavin and McGrath-Champ, 2016; McGrath-Champ et al., 2019).

This assemblage of different policies and practices aligns with broader processes of neoliberalisation, understood, paradoxically, as governmental intervention to support the values of the individual, choice and competition under the sign of the ‘free market’ (Connell, 2013; Wilkins, 2018). However, although a broad neoliberal narrative is visible across these state-based public education systems, moments of local variation and nuance in policy decisions are evident: the elements and pace of change towards school devolution and marketisation vary notably between NSW, which has one of the most centralised Australian school systems, and other Australian states. As compared to Western Australia’s IPS programme, the LSLD programme represents a more moderate devolutionary state policy. While the IPS system devolves staffing processes to local choice in all instances (i.e. apart from a recently instigated requirement for IP schools to at least consider redeployees of the centralised system; Fitzgerald et al., 2018), the NSW system only allows local choice for every second appointment, and this is after incentive transfers and Aboriginal employment applicants have been placed (NSW DEC, 2014). NSW has also refused the employment of Teach for Australia associates in its schools (Knott, 2016), another instance wherein it has maintained a more centralised approach to the governance of its system than that evident, for example, in Western Australia.

Part of this policy differentiation undoubtedly arises from the relative industrial strength, advocacy and public policy influence of the NSWTF, which has campaigned against the forms of school autonomy or school-based management now being advocated by state and federal politicians. As the LSLD programme was introduced, the President of the NSWTF observed inherent contradiction that belies overt political claims:

Many of the same politicians who are so reticent to increase funding to public schools are keen to market ‘principal’ autonomy. Do we really believe that the same politicians who aggressively talk about ‘accountability’ and push centralised command-and-control systems such as testing and national curriculum suddenly want to ‘empower' teachers? (Caro, 2012).

The NSWTF considers itself both an industrial and a professional union concerned with advancing the industrial interests and working conditions of its members under the ‘umbrella campaign’ of defending and promoting public education and supporting the welfare and educational outcomes of students (Fitzgerald, 2011a; O’Brien, 1987; Zadkovich, 1999). In a discussion of education policy contexts, Sherington and Hughes (2012) have noted how active the NSWTF has been, historically, in maintaining and defending teachers’ conditions: ‘For a century, the Labor movement in NSW supported, consolidated and developed the public education system’ (p. 138). Meanwhile, Louise Fitzgerald (2011b: 124) contends that the NSWTF is ‘arguably the most militant component’ of public education teacher unions in Australia.

Following this tradition, the NSWTF has once more campaigned about the effects of recent policy changes on the work hours and work effort required from teachers. Its influence has been enhanced by a number of contextual matters. As Stacey (2017) notes, at the time of the introduction of the LSLD initiative, the NSW Minister for Education, Adrian Piccoli, was seen as unusually consultative and for a number of years helped to restrain the extent of the neoliberal incursion outlined by federal (and other state) policy settings. As a National Party member, this may have reflected his concerns about the effects of educational policy changes on his disadvantaged country electorate. Moreover, the strong performance of the comparatively more centralised NSW public education system opened space for a more discriminating approach to education policy ‘reform’: according to Jensen (2013), at the time that the LSLD pilot programme was being introduced, NSW had achieved National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and Programme for International Student Assessment literacy and numeracy outcomes equivalent to, or higher than, Victoria, which implemented school autonomy policies from the early 1990s. NSW and Victoria ranked at the top of the achievement domains assessed across Australian states.

Although LSLD may represent a more moderate devolutionary state policy, the Federation continues to challenge the effects of its underlying tenets:

The list of tasks imposed on schools by the Department continues to grow. Neoliberal policies such as Local Schools, Local Decisions have contributed to work intensification, longer working hours and decreased job security. Devolution of responsibility to individual workplaces without sufficient resources creates increased pressure on all teachers, executives and, especially, teaching principals in terms of the way work is organised and carried out. (NSWTF, 2016)

The NSWTF has cited the results of the NSW Public Service Commission’s ‘People Matter’ survey from 2016 to argue that an unacceptable level of work-related stress is experienced by most teachers. Only 39% of teachers completing that survey thought their workload was acceptable and only 46% reported that they were able to keep their stress at an acceptable level; moreover, only 29% believed that action would be taken by their organisation (the DoE) on the results of the survey (Lemaire, 2016). While the NSWTF as an organisation has challenged changes in teachers’ conditions of work and employment, our research sought to gain insights into its members’ specific experiences of work intensification and its consequences, such as stress.

Work intensification and the teaching labour process

Although some articles in this journal have addressed union responses to work intensification (e.g. Lambert et al., 2005), the topic has not figured prominently in Australian industrial relations research (see Burgess and Connell, 2005; Watson et al., 2003). More specifically, the industrial relations field has given comparatively little academic attention to the employment conditions and working conditions of teachers. The few exceptions to this lack of attention include Burchielli (2006) and Burchielli et al. (2005), who produced research on Australian teachers’ work conditions, and Considine (2012), who looked at work intensification among NSW teachers and principals in the context of marketisation. Both Considine's (2012) and Burchielli’s (2006) research draw on LPT, which views work intensification and chronic work overload as integral to the exploitation and subordination of labour. Burchielli (2006: 149) argued that

[t]he reported negative effects of work intensification illustrate its relationship to the degradation of work, in line with labour process theory, from which the concept of intensification originates (Braverman, 1974), and which contextualises intensification within the continuous, historical process of [social] reproduction…, albeit in new forms.

In Australia, Connell (1985) and Smyth (2001) have also used LPT in their analyses of teachers’ work.

Internationally, within the field of education research, the notion of work intensification has been marked by the influential work of Apple (1986), whose ‘intensification thesis’ drew on critical labour theories to highlight the growing external pressure on teachers to undertake a greater number and diversity of tasks without sufficient time and resources. Apple saw the intrusion of external pressures on teaching as leading to a separation of the conception of teaching processes and foci and the execution in the classroom. In the ensuing debates about this process, the concepts of intensification were often linked with de-professionalisation and deskilling. Carter (1997) notes, however, that the way these concepts have commonly been used has displayed two basic errors. The first flaw was to adopt and adapt a far too literal version of Braverman’s deskilling hypothesis and then apply it to teachers (Ozga and Lawn, 1988), a position that assumed teachers would face uncomplicated processes of deskilling and increased direct control. The second, related flaw was to view the growth of new layers of management within schools and the emergence of new mechanisms of control, particularly associated with neoliberal reform of schools, as being antithetical to teachers’ retainment of forms of autonomy, discretion and skill (Carter and Stevenson, 2012: 483; Reid, 2003). As Gewirtz (1997: 223–224) notes,

The labour process of teaching has always been intense…what is different in this age of market forces and managerialism is the pattern and texture of intensification – the nature of the tasks that are absorbing increased quantities of teacher time and emotional labour.

A consequence of neoliberal approaches to educational reform has been the increased workload outcomes of increased ‘accountability’ and teacher ‘responsibility’ (Brennan, 2009; Dinham, 2013). Williamson and Myhill (2008: 25) argue that these include ‘considerably longer working hours than in the past, an ever-expanding teaching role, and most noticeably, a significant increase in nonteaching and largely administrative duties’.

Indeed, such changes are associated with new, contested and mediated forms of professional identity for teachers and principals. Authors such as Hargreaves (1994) and Gewirtz (1996) reacted against the so-called hard-line objectivist Bravermanesque stance, which proposed that teacher work intensification was simply misrecognised as professionalism and thus voluntarily supported by many teachers. Hargreaves (1994: 127) argued this was both a ‘churlish’ and ‘theoretically presumptuous’ position, while Gewirtz (1996) averred that ‘teachers are not the passive dupes of classical Marxism, unwittingly coopted as agents of the state; they are active agents resisting state control strategies and forcing their employers to refine and rework those strategies’. Here Gewirtz (1996) advocated for ‘more sophisticated versions of labour process [that] emphasize the subjective and conscious responses of teachers to the objective conditions which shape their work’. Mainstream LPT has, of course, long been marked by an emphasis on worker agency and, rather than a determining discourse, professionalism should be seen as a ‘symbolic resource’ that ‘workplace actors as knowledgeable agents draw on … in their relations of contestation and co-operation’ (Thompson and Findlay, 1999, quoted in Marks and Thompson, 2010). Teachers, as Berry (2012) notes, ‘guard the notion of themselves as professionals with intensity and their role as professional people is central to the way in which most define themselves’ (p. 61). Work intensification can be promoted by education departments and new layers of management as part of a strengthened teacher professionalism, but in many instances externally imposed changes to work have in fact led to the ‘feeling of a general erosion of teacher professionalism [and] teachers’ loss of a “sense of control”’ (Williamson and Myhill, 2008: 26). In such cases a ‘top-down’ organisational professionalism is in tension with more collegial occupational professionalism (Evetts, 2009). However, this latter occupational professionalism, emerging from teachers’ own commitment to students and their needs, can itself operate as an internally driven pressure on their work and strengthen processes of intensification (Ballet and Kelchtermans, 2008; Williamson and Myhill, 2008).

Given the differentiated and often contested processes of work intensification (Hargreaves, 1994), Ballet and Kelchtermans (2008, 2009) have argued for a focus on the ‘experience of work intensification’, rather than intensification as a global concept (Ballet et al., 2006). They argue that the ‘steering’ impact of external policies on teachers is not always straightforward because ‘the experience of intensification is mediated through processes of interpretation and sense-making that are influenced by the organizational working conditions’ (Ballet and Kelchtermans, 2009), and as such ‘external demands are always filtered, interpreted and negotiated and are mediated by local autonomy and the professionalism of school teams’ (Ballet and Kelchtermans, 2008: 48). They argue that the experience of intensification is strongly influenced by the cultural and organisational characteristics of the school, which they define as the school’s collegial relationships, leadership and cultural norms. Moreover, they note that the impact of intensification is experienced differently among different teachers: ‘Not all teachers experience it as negative or inhibiting’ (Ballet and Keltchtermans, 2008: 48). Similarly, Van Droogenbroeck et al. (2014) found that interpersonal relationships are differentially related to burnout, which they associate with an outcome of work intensification.

Despite the externally driven pressures and work intensification associated with overarching education policy and organisational reform, the notion of differentiated and often buffered experiences of intensification, related to the outlook of the individual teacher and context, is therefore present in the literature. These key points are particularly relevant to this study; however, we have sought to extend such analyses beyond collegial relationships, leadership and cultural norms. Specifically, we looked at school settings related to school geography, socio-educational status and school type (primary and secondary). The article thereby develops a spatially sensitive framework for analysing the experience of work intensification, extending previous considerations of the geography of teachers and teaching (see e.g. Brasche and Harrington, 2012; Cuervo, 2016; Cuervo and Acquaro, 2016; Lassig et al., 2015), the influence of social advantage (see e.g. Stacey, 2018; Thomson et al., 2016) and primary or secondary enrolment (see e.g. McKenzie et al., 2014; Saltmarsh et al., 2015). The methods by which we sought to do this are outlined in the following.

Methods

The data for this article consist of 22 face-to-face interviews with teachers attending the 2015 annual conference of the NSWTF. The sampling strategy combined purposive and convenience approaches (Harsh, 2011; Robinson, 2014). Most of the 22 interviewees at the annual conference were the Federation Representatives (‘Fed Rep’), that is the local union delegates for their schools; others were NSWTF members attending out of a more general interest. The teaching union delegates were selected because of their unique position gained through union involvement, combined with their knowledge of colleagues’, and their own, experience of working as teachers. Accessing these respondents via the annual conference also enabled access to participants from rural (also described as ‘provincial’ – see later) areas. Facilitated by the conference organisers, the participants were self-selected – delegates volunteered to participate in this exploratory study. This process adequately covered the sampling categories.

A case study method (Flyvbjerg, 2006) focusing on one union in a single Australian state was appropriate given NSWTF’s status as the largest teacher union in Australia and the influence of neoliberal reforms, including the presence of workload issues, in NSW (McKenzie et al., 2014). Founded in 1918, the Federation’s current membership is approximately 53,000, with women comprising over 70% of its members (White, 2004). The Federation has typically sustained high union membership and density levels, with 82% of the 65,000 teachers employed in the NSW public education system in 2018 being members (Fitzgerald, 2011a; NSW Department of Education, 2017; NSWTF, 2017). At the time of the study, the Federation employed 46 full-time officers across various senior leadership, professional and industrial roles.

The union delegates in this study are integral to the Federation’s structure. At the union’s core is a focus on democracy and participation of members in its decision-making bodies (Fitzgerald, 2011a), including the Annual Conference (approximately 600 delegates), a 300 rank-and-file member council that meets eight times per year, and an Executive comprised of Federation leadership and practising teachers (Fitzgerald, 2011a; Tattersall, 2006). This is supported by a decentralised structure (over 160 regionally based teacher associations that meet monthly), with membership activity and organisation concentrated at the local branch level (Spaull and Hince, 1986) through a union delegate (Federation representative), women’s contact and Workplace Committee in each public school across the state (Tattersall, 2006).

Study participants ranged across primary (n = 10) and secondary (n = 12) school settings. Interviews were semi-structured and covered hours of work, role as teacher and Federation representative, how these have changed, and the effects of recent policy shifts. Necessary background information was gathered covering respondents’ work history, broader policy context, location, and nature of school. A list of teaching-relevant working conditions and employment conditions was used as a prompt if required by participants; however, as elaborated in the following, participants seemed to have difficulty articulating their thoughts on these whether shown the list or not. The study was granted ethical approval by the University of Sydney, NSW. At the time of the interviews the NSW DoE was named the Department of Education and Communities (DEC).

Transcribed interviews were analysed inductively using nVIVO^© through the generation of codes, which were cross-checked to build analytical validity. We analysed reports of change by relevant profile variables, namely school socio-educational status (Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA)),¹ primary or secondary enrolment and metropolitan or provincial location. For this purpose, ICSEA ratings from the My School website were used to categorise schools as low, mid or high ICSEA. With a median of 1000 and a standard deviation of 100, schools with values below 950 were considered low (n = 5); between 950 and 1100 ‘mid’ (n = 12); and above 1100, high (n = 4). There was, however, a need to exercise some flexibility in this with lower and upper mid-status schools, detailed as relevant in the results below. Locational designations were similarly established through the categorisation of schools on the My School website, namely metropolitan, provincial or remote, through which our sample broadly reflected the geographical distribution of students (i.e. 74%, 25% and 1%, respectively; Thomson et al., 2016). For our sample, 16 teachers were from metropolitan schools and 6 from povincial ones but no teachers were from remote schools, this relative lack of representation likely reflecting the difficulty in attending a central event from such locations. We do not make strong claims for representativeness of the sample, or the generalisability of the findings in this exploratory, qualitative study. We report the results of the study in such a way to show how the diversity of responses is related to contextual factors. We also acknowledge the need for further research in this area, preferably with a larger, more representative sample for strong external validity.

Findings

Whole-sample findings

Teachers in our sample, given their active role in the union and as participants in the union’s annual conference, were considered to have the capacity for informed views concerning work-related issues in relation to current policy. Such potential was perhaps realised in the comments of approximately one-third of teacher participants, made without explicit prompting, regarding what they saw as the increasing politicisation of schools. ‘There’s a disconnect between political decisions that are being made and what actually needs to be made in the classroom’, one teacher commented; another lamented that ‘it’s all about teacher bashing, three strikes you’re out, new code of conduct, new dress code, how could we [DoE] save money?’. Teachers linked politicisation to increasing pressures to perform, while operating in an environment of ever-increasing innovation.

Indeed, multiple teachers were also quick to comment that they felt some of the innovations and initiatives implemented in their schools were not founded in research, but rather implemented to respond to the increasing performance pressures and the political agendas that heightened these. One teacher felt that recent developments in the Department were ‘all based on fiscal’. Another put forward the idea that:

now the DEC doesn’t make decisions based on what’s best for children, parents, or teachers [but] what’s best for them politically. So there’s this horrible position where you’ve got child-based decisions that need to be made but they’re making them with politics.

Half of our sample commented on cuts of various size and shape, either to school funding or other support services used by teachers. Cuts in the Department were largely viewed with cynicism – as being about ‘where [they] can save some bucks’. District offices were described as being ‘like ghost towns’, while central curriculum consultants were also described as having been vastly reduced: ‘they sacked everyone at the DEC [in this role]’. Thus the provision of support for teachers was seen as being reduced, while simultaneously, requirements for teachers to perform were reported to have increased.

Indeed, the most overriding theme reported nearly unanimously across these interviews was that of an increased workload. ‘We never have enough time to do anything. I always feel like I’m band-aiding things’, one stated. Another was emphatic: ‘workload has increased, definitely’; ‘it’s just been crazy, it’s been like nonstop’. Within this, the most dominant concern seemed to be with administrative requirements, and particularly paperwork. One interviewee expressed this succinctly as ‘a tsunami of paperwork’, while the same participant who felt she was ‘band-aiding things’ explained how

the pile just grows and grows and grows and then, so then you start a new pile … I’ve got a pile on this side of my desk and then when that pile started to get too big there’s a new pile on that side. And now there’s a pile growing on my computer table as well. And it’s all of this paperwork that I have to get through.

Another participant commented that ‘it’s a huge workload, you can’t just keep putting more and more and more and more and more. Something’s got to give’. One teacher felt as though ‘to have the best come from the students you’ve also got to look after your staff and teachers, and by working them to the bone, to the point of breaking, I don’t see that as beneficial at all’. Two other teachers discussed pressures to provide personalised learning plans, thus requiring additional workload in terms of accessing technology-based assessment data, including NAPLAN, as well as completing the documents themselves. As another participant commented, ‘the completion of all those documents … we’ve got students that will have up to five different documents attached to [i.e. associated with] them’. Although not all paperwork was new, and not all participants necessarily saw it as growing (one participant commented that she had ‘always felt swamped by the paperwork’), its impact and the frequency of its reference by interviewees was striking.

A third of teachers explicitly linked such increased administrative requirements to increases in performance and accountability mechanisms, saying that ‘the accountability and the double checking of things has been huge’; in another interview, that ‘it’s about ticking the boxes, doing this and that’. A further participant explained how ‘now you’ve got to get a million people to sign off on something and check that you’ve read sixteen thousand policies, that you’ve got all the paper… everything now is a minefield’. This was also seen as related to devolutionary changes. One participant stated that ‘the reality is there isn’t the funding any more, the release and the time to pay for people to do this so more and more of it comes down to you’. Another explained that ‘people in schools are doing more, stuff that used to be handled a little bit further up the ladder isn’t being handled further up the ladder’. There was also a sense within the research data that this increased paperwork had an interactive effect – magnifying the impact of all the other reported changes. The participant last quoted, for instance, also referred to cuts to staff welfare programmes.

The only positive report on devolution-driven changes by a teacher was also qualified, creating a sense of ambivalence. This participant felt that increased responsibility was good; however, the associated lack of support was noted with some concern. In reference to the new professional development framework which teachers in NSW need to complete, this participant commented:

I think [this] has been put in place in some way because we have lost our consultants who used to [provide] support, where … part of … the professional development framework is … putting the onus back on teachers to work together. And I think that’s a good thing, [but] it would be nice to have some sort of experts there as well to sort of guide us along.

This exemplifies the misrecognition of work intensification as professionalism, yet this sole, partially positive reaction to the changes is in tension with the clearly dominant view that saw the changes as politicisation. What is surprising, given the participants and context of the interviews, is that there was not more emphasis placed on the politicisation issue; that is, the manner in which political influences are impacting on teachers’ work and conditions. Moreover, it is also surprising that teachers did not have much to say in relation to employment conditions (specifically the changing nature of the management of their work). Indeed, their discussion of working conditions was heavily oriented towards workload increases, as seen earlier. The changes in the management of their work did not figure prominently.

Context-specific findings

Noticeable differences from disaggregated results, according to the ICSEA, level of schooling (primary, secondary) and metropolitan or provincial location are outlined in the following.

ICSEA

It is well established that the level of advantage of a student body influences student learning and achievement (Thomson et al., 2016). It also affects teachers. In low-ICSEA schools, negotiation of the curriculum in what is essentially a middle-class institution, that of schooling, can require more and different work for teachers (Stacey, 2018). Such schools can also contain greater concentrations of students with varied and particular needs due to processes of residualisation, as a result of the operation of market forces (Stacey, 2018). Meanwhile, in higher ICSEA schools, expectations for teachers can centre more on matters of public relations, for instance in regards to extracurricular provision (Stacey, 2018). There is therefore the potential for difference in respect to working conditions accompanying these contrasting educational contexts.

The sole mention of student behaviour as a relevant aspect of working conditions was expressed by a teacher from a school with a markedly low ICSEA rating (below 900). Similarly, concerns regarding special education provision were mentioned only by teachers in low-ICSEA schools. There were also some trends relating to comments which, although not exclusively from participants working in schools with ICSEA values below 950, all came from participants in schools below the median of 1000. In these schools, comments reflecting a sense of animosity against the principal and expressions of concern at a perceived lack of ‘staff welfare’ were found. One participant in this context explained how, when he raised issues with his principal, his concerns were dismissed with the response ‘we’re all busy’. Another said, ‘our principal adopts the philosophy at the school [that] it’s not her job to make the staff happy’. Similarly, all the comments about ‘non-evidence based’ initiatives in schools also came from contexts with ICSEA values below 1000.

In schools with average ICSEA scores, there was more reference to parental pressures, including the perception of negative interactions with parents. One participant commented that ‘the parents can make your life a misery’; another that:
they come from the corporate world and they want KPIs and all this … that’s not what we do … it can be very difficult to negotiate with those sorts of parents and, of course, abuse from parents has greatly increased.
These teachers were also more likely to comment on the loss of services. One reported that ‘now we’ve got no one to go to. So we are sort of muddling around in the dark’. This participant went on to explain the kind of support that does tend to be available these days, which is web based and inadequate: ‘here’s the website for your staff member who was going to run the training, but the trainer wasn’t trained’. Of dire importance, there was also a concern from two teachers from average-ICSEA schools that the increased workload was affecting their teaching.
So there’s all these different things going on at school but it’s also the extra admin work that’s put on top of the teaching which has [been] really affected – I guess in the bottom line it is affecting the quality [of] teaching.
In high-ICSEA contexts, concerns of student welfare – particularly anxiety – were more evident. For instance, one participant from a selective secondary school expressed concern about the lack of support for high-achieving language background other than English students, who did not qualify for support but needed it. In this section of the market – as with the teachers from the average ICSEA schools – there was also mention of parents. One participant commented on parents’ wanting her personal information: ‘we have parents demanding it [her email and personal phone number] and wanting you to email their child’s homework and wanting private meetings all the time’. Another participant in this context spoke of ‘whisper campaigns’ around NAPLAN results, and hinted at a resulting breakdown of collegiality – ‘we should be working together, and until NAPLAN, everybody did. But now there’s constant whispers about what did we get this year, and who was on the grade the year before, and you know, it’s not good’.

Primary and secondary schools

Subject specialisation is a feature of secondary teaching with teachers commonly teaching across several year levels, whereas primary teachers ordinarily remain as ‘generalists’ (McKenzie et al., 2014), teaching a single-level class for a whole year across all subject areas. Primary teachers’ work involves more hours face to face with their single class of students (McKenzie et al., 2014), while secondary teachers spend less hours face to face, but teach a range of classes constituted by different groups of students across different year levels and, with correspondingly substantial marking and preparation duties, almost match the total average work hours of primary teachers. Another key difference is in relation to the nature and degree of involvement of parents. Research has indicated that middle-class parents, in particular, actively nurture the education of their children in primary years, both inside and outside of school (Lareau, 2011). Such active involvement diminishes (Saltmarsh et al., 2015) – although does not cease (Stacey, 2016) – as students move into the secondary context, where one of parents’ main forms of involvement becomes choice of school, given the greater variation in market ‘options’ in the secondary sector (Stacey, 2018).

In our sample, primary school teachers commented on increased paperwork, and in addition described workload increases in relation to reporting, programming and technology requirements. They also recounted experiencing negative interactions with parents. This was especially apparent in responses from teachers in high-ICSEA schooling contexts. All issues of ‘stress’ that arose in these interviews were expressed by the primary school teacher participants, with one even saying that she knew ‘teachers in [her] area’ who had ‘contemplated suicide because of how hard the job is’ and another that she has ‘seen people [teachers] almost go under … too overworked and stressed … there’s too much of that’.

Although negative parent–teacher interactions were less commented on by secondary school teachers, they too reported increasing workload, primarily through paperwork, but also due to assessment and differentiated teaching requirements. In addition, these teachers referred to a greater focus on particular kinds of individualised student need. For instance, a teacher in a high-ICSEA metropolitan selective high school commented on the need to ‘help kids with their organisation or their anxiety’, while a teacher in a low-ICSEA provincial high school explained that while a relatively new focus on ‘kids as individuals’ with ‘individual needs’ was understandable – ‘how can you argue with the theory of it? You can’t’ – such an approach to teaching still meant ‘a lot more work’.

Location

Geographical location can shape the nature of schooling and impact on teaching and teachers in schools. Surrounded by a greater number of schools, those in metropolitan areas can be exposed to intense competition. Rural and remote schools may have difficulty attracting and retaining staff (Cuervo and Acquaro, 2016; Fitzgerald et al., 2018), which can establish an enduring sense of transience, even for the teachers who remain in such locations (Stacey, 2018), and teachers can experience a ‘fishbowl’ effect whereby they are highly visible in the community (Brasche and Harrington, 2012). There is also often a requirement to teach multiple subjects and/or teach out of field because of fewer staff to cover the curriculum, and relatedly, a sense of isolation for a teacher who may be the only specialist in his or her area (Cuervo, 2016). Teachers are also often parents, subject to the pressures of school choice, which might tempt them away from rural and remote areas to more abundant schooling options elsewhere (Lassig et al., 2015).

In metropolitan schools, interviewees focused more heavily on concerns with, and indeed some animosity towards, principals and parents. One mid-ICSEA metropolitan high school teacher explained how there was ‘a lot more demand from [their] parent body’ these days, while a mid-ICSEA metropolitan primary school teacher, quoted above, commented that parents ‘can make your life misery’. Meanwhile, a high-ICSEA metropolitan primary school teacher was quite vocal about principals, describing some they knew of as ‘gutless’ ‘DEC stooges’, unwilling to ‘stand up’ against political change.

The only two comments regarding special needs for students, meanwhile, were both in provincial schools with low ICSEA values. Conversely, issues with being fearful of recrimination from superiors or being unable to take breaks (‘you could not have gone to the bathroom between 8.00 and 1.10pm’ given successive work tasks of staff meeting–class–recess duty) were all discussed by metropolitan participants and not by provincial ones.

Discussion

The results of this study indicate that teachers’ working conditions are affected by a complex range of interacting factors, difficult to quarantine or to understand in isolation. One of these factors is the influence of neoliberal policy enveloping the whole of Australia, although with some visible differences at various levels and geographical scales, reflected in different state-level policies and market technologies. Our article illustrates one effect of these, namely the intensification of teaching work, in regard to one state jurisdiction, NSW.

The major finding in this study, that teachers were experiencing an increased and unmanageable workload, manifest especially in piles of paperwork, may at first seem unrelated to devolutionary approaches to schooling. However, it reflects a symptom of a neoliberal approach. Greater ‘responsibility’ in modern neoliberalisations (Peck, 2010) is accompanied by increased accountability requirements (Brennan, 2009; Dinham, 2013), and a number of our participants explicitly linked their workload concerns with such mechanisms. When central services are cut (‘diminished support’) – something our participants told us about abundantly – burdens need to be shifted, and someone needs to be made ‘accountable’, leading to the apparently paradoxical, simultaneous decentralisation and increasing centralisation that we have seen in neoliberal reforms globally (Connell, 2013). ‘Autonomy’ in this sense could almost be defined as synonymous with increases in workload.

Very few interviewees, however, referred to a specific policy or policies in relation to conditions of work and employment. This was because, first, few teachers articulated anything in relation to employment conditions. Second, interviewees’ reports relating to conditions of work were consistently oriented towards workload increases, as we have seen, and these effects are not directly articulated in education policy but are instead a ‘second-order’ effect of them (Ball, 1993). The increased workloads were discussed in relation to the removal of central DoE services and also the loss of other within-school budgets and support. It is interesting that while teachers clearly perceived these as losses, they can be explained in relation to the new autonomy of principals who are now free to control substantial budgets (Gavin and McGrath-Champ, 2016). This aspect of the changing form of management that governs teachers’ labour process was not highlighted by the respondents. Principals may simply see these losses as ‘using money differently’; indeed, we know that principals have had a rather more positive response to devolutionary measures in NSW (McGrath-Champ et al., 2019) than those evinced here by our teachers.

Overall, it is pertinent that although teachers were asked about their conditions of work and employment conditions, most of their responses were not concerned with industrial issues but were instead concerned with school aims. They appeared primarily guided by an occupational professionalism, concerned with students and their needs. This belies (often politically popular) notions of teachers’ union members being inappropriately self-interested and insufficiently committed to their jobs. It also reflects that teachers who take on the role of union workplace delegate (Fed Reps) are not necessarily imbued- prior to or even during their term- with vast industrial relations knowledge (Peetz and Alexander, 2013), but rather do so out of general interest, or in some instances due to the necessity for ‘someone’ to take on this unpaid role for which they receive no workload offset. It may also reflect that these workplace delegates, in common with their counterparts in other industries (such as higher education), are not always able to see beyond the ‘trees’ that surround them (work intensification) to understand the wider ‘forest’ (configuration of employment-relations institutions and regulations that establish their within-school experiences of work).

Our study also indicates that work intensification is differentiated in other ‘fine-grained’ ways. Teachers’ working environments can best be understood when situated within their local school context (in which the principal is seen as an important force; Fitzgerald et al., 2018), which is in turn affected by the factors including those outlined above relating to socio-educational status, primary or secondary orientation and location. This local school context is then subject to broader governance technologies (Lingard et al., 2013), which themselves are influenced by the particular political philosophies within which they are articulated. A strictly linear sequence of policy effects ‘up’ and ‘down’ a scalar hierarchy from national, through state, to regional and local is not appropriate or advocated here (Herod et al., 2010), nor is the power balance between these components considered equal. However, teachers are subject to these forces; while pushback is certainly possible, and occurs daily, the ‘weight’ of what must be pushed back is nevertheless substantial and, it appears, growing.

Indeed, the finding that participants saw teaching as increasingly politicised reflects the current status of education, which is seen as a crucial aspect of international economic competitiveness (Ball, 2008). The comments by participants that particular programmes being introduced to schools were not ‘evidence-based’ is perhaps related to such anxieties. Recent research has taken a critical view of policy that claims to be ‘evidence-based’ (e.g. Welch, 2015), given that current competitive orientations towards education have led to some perverse interpretations and manipulations of data (Lingard and Sellar, 2013). Given that all mentions of this ‘non-evidence-based’ approach came from schools with ICSEA ratings below 1000, it is possible that this reflects a sense of pressure for such schools in raising ‘results’ within an era of national testing and accountability, which may encourage a search for quick solutions to complex problems.

Similarly, market-related responses were visible across the disaggregation outlined above. The responses of teachers in schools serving students experiencing socio-educational disadvantage reflected a range of complex student needs indicative of schools which have been residualised by market forces (Stacey, 2018; Thomson et al., 2016), as well as a sense of both teachers and principals being overwhelmed by such demands. Meanwhile, teachers in schools in advantaged positions had a focus on working with engaged, and at times intrusive, parental interest – middle-class parents tend to be much more visibly involved in schooling and in extracting the product they expect will be provided for them (Campbell et al., 2009; Lareau, 2011; Stacey, 2016). Parents’ anxieties were also more visible in the primary setting, reflecting their greater involvement at that level (meanwhile, a focus on being prepared for individual students was evident at secondary level – however, this may simply reflect the greater total number of students with which secondary teachers interact daily). Parents were also a focus of those who worked in metropolitan schools. This is arguably because schools in metropolitan areas are more overtly subject to market forces, surrounded as they can be with more intense competition. Such intensities were possibly also the source of the increased tensions visible between teachers and their principals, who would perhaps seek to extract more from their staff in order to better their market position. In provincial schools, market competitiveness holds less obvious sway, except in its articulation through larger concentrations of disadvantage, potentially reflected in these participants’ greater focus on special needs. It is also possible that the relative lack of animosity towards principals and parents in provincial schools reflects the greater levels of care that can be present in such settings (McGrath-Champ et al., 2019), given their status as harder to staff.

There is a widespread trend today, emanating from the realm of psychology (Riley, 2014), to locate the issue of work overload at the individual level with accompanying ‘solutions’ being for individuals to ‘fix themselves’ via ‘wellness’ activities and programmes (Krupka, 2015). While Ballet et al. (2006) and Ballet and Kelchtermans (2009) have revealed that work intensification differs according to interpersonal relations and individual teachers’ perspectives, conveying that individual factors and perceptions mediate the experiences of work overload and stress, it has become commonplace to overlook the insidiousness of over-inflated expectations of the quantum of work that a person can undertake. Moreover, as heralded by Godard (2014), the overly individualistic, psychologically founded approaches to employment relations and human resource management from which contemporary workplace management commonly emanates denies and misconstrues the existence and necessity of the institutional fabric of employment relations policy and processes, including the role of trade unions and collective voice.

Conclusion

In examining issues concerning workload of school teachers within the multi-layered and complex array of employment and education policy, this article provides evidence of devolution-driven work intensification. The study furnishes indicative evidence of a general process of neoliberalism enveloping Australian education, albeit with variations at several scales. The state level (or ‘scale’) holds prominence via different policy prescriptions and market technologies and we provide some insights about what is happening in the state of NSW, establishing a foundation for comparison with other states.

There are other ways in which workload impact is differentiated and we have begun to unpack just a few, identifying indicative effects of socio-educational advantage, school enrolment type and within-state location. This makes clear that work intensification for teachers is very widespread, yet is not the same ‘everywhere’. There is a need to look across a wide spectrum of differentiating influences to trace and understand this phenomenon of work intensification more fully. In doing so we concur with Gewirtz’s (1996) call for a simultaneous recognition of the ‘local variations in the internal regimes of control in schools’ and a focus on ‘policies that represent responses to structural problems of the state [that] have some generalised effects across the school system’ (emphasis in original). There must be an insistence that broader employment institutions, mechanisms and regulation be reinserted into the explanatory landscape, as a focus on the individual as the locus of this matter is false, fraught and will fail to provide a ‘remedy’. There is a need to appreciate ‘the different ways in which teachers are responding to the attempted imposition of a new teaching culture’ (Gewirtz, 1996, emphasis in original); yet approaching this issue with a sense of the collective, institutional dimension highlights the need for pushback in regard to systemic drivers of work intensification.

To further interrogate and unpack the neoliberal meta-narrative, there needs to be (a) more fine-grained research on the mutually constitutive nature of work and its intensification, (b) larger scale investigation of this within the current NSW context and (c) equivalent study in other states and national contexts that can establish a foundation for action. Such an approach will serve to further map the effects of policy change in the current political climate for teachers. Yet in doing so, it can also serve as a point of comparison for other public sector professionals, and thus speak back to policymakers at both state and national levels, and across a range of occupational arenas.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Note

Biographical note

Scott Fitzgerald is Senior Lecturer in the Curtin Business School’s School of Management. His research interests cover public services (especially education) and new public management, as well as cultural industry corporations and creative work. His research projects span various disciplines: industrial relations, sociology, political economy, and media and communication studies.

Susan McGrath-Champ is Associate Professor in the Work and Organisational Studies Discipline at the University of Sydney Business School, Australia. Her research includes the geographical aspects of the world of work, employment relations and international human resource management. Recent studies include those of school teachers’ work and working conditions.

Meghan Stacey is a former high school English and drama teacher and current academic with the Sydney School of Education and Social Work and the Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney. Meghan’s primary research interests sit at the intersection of sociological theory, policy sociology and the experiences of those subject to systems of education. Meghan’s PhD was conferred in April 2018.

Rachel Wilson is Senior Lecturer at The Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. She has expertise in educational assessment, research methods and programme evaluation. As such she has broad interests across educational evidence, policy and practice. She is interested in system-level reform and has been involved in designing, implementing and researching many university and school education reforms.

Mihajla Gavin is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney Business School and has worked as a senior officer in the public sector in Australia across various workplace relations advisory, policy and project roles. Mihajla’s research is concerned with analysing the response of teacher unions to neoliberal education reform that has affected teachers’ conditions of work.

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