EduResearch Matters March 9, 2026 By Mihajla Gavin, Meghan Stacey, Susan McGrath-Champ, Rachel Wilson and Scott Fitzgerald
Teacher workload has come to be understood as a significant problem in Australia, contributing to stress, burnout and workforce attrition. Over the last decade, there has been a wealth of empirical research which has carefully documented how teacher workload and work intensity are impacting the profession.
But perhaps surprisingly, there is little research discussing ways to ‘fix’ this problem. We have few comprehensive insights on how to tackle workload, and scarce empirical research from the voice of teachers on what is needed.
Of what has been published in research and government policies to date, the ways forward to deal with the problem seem highly varied and sometimes even contradictory. In New South Wales, policies like the Quality Time Program have been pitched as solutions to alleviate the administrative burdens on teachers, alongside hiring more staff to manage school administration, and developing online tools and resources that promise to deliver quicker lesson plans for teachers. Other proposals have called for decreasing class sizes or reducing the size of the school curriculum.
In our new research recently published in The Australian Educational Researcher, we were interested to understand teachers’ views on how to manage workload and what teachers articulated as most necessary to manage their workload. Our secondary-analysis study drew from union-commissioned survey data of more than 50,000 teachers and school leaders across all Australian states, approximately one-quarter of teachers in Australia’s public schools. These surveys, which were carried out across six states between 2016 and 2022, all focused on teacher workload and ways to manage workload.
