39% of Australian Teachers Plan to Leave. Here's What They Should Do Next.

39% of Australian teachers plan to leave the profession before retirement.

Another 35% aren't sure they'll stay.

That's not a typo. According to data from the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL), nearly three quarters of the teaching workforce is either planning to walk away or standing in the doorway trying to decide.

The Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) has echoed the same findings. The numbers are consistent. The trend is clear. And if you're reading this with a knot in your stomach because you recognise yourself in that statistic, I want you to know something before we go any further.

You are not the problem.

The System Is Burning You Alive

Let's be honest about what's actually happening.

Teachers aren't leaving because they stopped caring about kids. Teachers aren't leaving because they lack commitment. Teachers aren't leaving because they're lazy, or entitled, or "not cut out for it."

Teachers are leaving because the job has become unsustainable.

The administrative load has doubled. The behavioural challenges have intensified. The expectations keep expanding while the support keeps shrinking. You're a counsellor, a social worker, a data analyst, a compliance officer, a conflict mediator, and somewhere in the margins of all that, you're supposed to actually teach.

And at the end of every term, someone in a policy meeting who hasn't been inside a classroom since 2007 explains that teacher wellbeing is "a priority."

If you've spent your Sunday afternoon writing reports instead of being with your family, you already know the gap between what they say and what they do.

You feel it every single week.

The $10M Question Nobody Is Asking

The federal government recently announced $10 million in funding to address the teacher shortage.

Sounds promising, right?

Except here's where that money is going: recruitment. Getting more people into teaching. More campaigns, more pathways, more incentives to attract fresh graduates into the profession.

Not a cent of it is aimed at keeping the teachers who are already there.

Think about that for a second. 39% of your current workforce is telling you they want to leave. Your response is to go find new people to replace them. Not to fix the conditions that are pushing them out. Not to address workload. Not to fund the kind of structural changes that would make the job liveable again.

It's like bailing water into a boat with a hole in the hull and calling it a solution.

The critics are right. You can't recruit your way out of a retention crisis. And every experienced teacher who walks out the door takes with them years of institutional knowledge, student relationships, and hard-won expertise that no graduate teacher can replace on day one.

But here's the thing. That policy failure is not your responsibility to fix.

The Reframe You Need to Hear

What if leaving teaching isn't a crisis of character?

What if it's a crisis of the system?

What if the skills you've built over years in the classroom are exactly what other industries desperately need, and the only thing holding you back is the story you've been told about what it means to leave?

Because here's what nobody tells you during your teaching degree: you've been doing some of the most complex, high-stakes knowledge work that exists. You just haven't been given the language to describe it that way.

Every time you designed a unit of work, you were doing product development. Every time you differentiated a lesson for 25 different learners, you were doing UX design. Every time you analysed assessment data to figure out what worked and what didn't, you were doing exactly what data analysts do in every tech company in the country.

You've been doing this work all along. The only difference is the vocabulary.

Your Skills, Translated

Let me be specific. Because "transferable skills" is one of those phrases that sounds nice but means nothing until someone shows you the receipts.

Curriculum design is product development. You've scoped, planned, built, tested, and iterated complex learning experiences for diverse audiences. That's a product cycle.

Differentiation is UX design. You assessed your users (students), identified their needs, and tailored the experience so it actually worked for them. Every UX designer in the country does the same thing with fewer variables and more time.

Assessment and reporting is data analysis. You collected data, identified patterns, drew conclusions, and communicated findings to stakeholders who needed actionable insights. Sound familiar?

Classroom management is team leadership. You've led groups of 25 to 30 people through complex tasks under time pressure with limited resources. Many of them didn't want to be there. Try doing that in a boardroom.

Parent conferences are stakeholder management. You've navigated difficult conversations with emotionally invested parties, delivered hard truths diplomatically, and maintained relationships through conflict. That's high-level communication.

IEPs and learning adjustments are user research. You observed, documented, hypothesised, tested, and adjusted. Iterative design, in real time, with real humans.

Lesson planning is project management. Scope, timeline, resources, contingencies, delivery, review. Every single day.

You haven't been "just teaching." You've been running a complex operation with almost no budget, minimal support, and an audience that gives you immediate, unfiltered feedback on everything you do.

That's not a weakness on your CV. That's a superpower.

What the 39% Should Actually Do

If you're one of the 39% who know they're leaving, or the 35% who are still deciding, here's what I'd tell you to do right now. Not in six months. Not when you "figure it out." Now.

Stop waiting for the system to fix itself.

It won't. They're spending $10 million on recruitment, not retention. The message is clear: they'd rather replace you than support you. Accept that, grieve it if you need to, and then start building your next move.

Start documenting your skills in business language.

Take every major thing you've done as a teacher and rewrite it using the translations above. Don't say "I taught Year 9 Science." Say "I designed and delivered a learning product for 150 users across multiple ability levels, using data-driven iteration to improve outcomes." Same job. Different language. Completely different response from a hiring manager.

Join a community of people doing the same thing.

The worst part of leaving teaching is feeling like you're the only one. You're not. There are hundreds of teachers right now, in Australia, figuring this out. Working through the identity shift. Translating their skills. Building things. Finding each other. You don't have to do this alone, and honestly, you shouldn't.

Read one book about product thinking.

Or user experience. Or design. Or, you know, Teach Yourself Out. The point isn't to become an expert overnight. The point is to see how much of it you already understand because of your teaching background. The overlap will surprise you.

Build one tiny thing on a weekend.

A resource. A template. A tool. A simple website. Anything. The goal isn't to launch a startup. The goal is to prove to yourself that you can create something outside the classroom. That your skills work in the real world. Because they do.

This Is Happening Here

I want to be clear about something. This isn't an American trend piece. This isn't Silicon Valley career advice repackaged for an Australian audience.

This is Australian data. AITSL. AARE. Australian teachers, in Australian schools, facing a distinctly Australian policy failure.

The gap between "recruit more teachers" and "keep the ones we have" is enormous. And sitting right in that gap are thousands of teachers who've been told their whole career that leaving means failing. That the only honourable path is to stay, endure, and keep giving more of themselves to a system that keeps taking.

That story isn't true. It was never true. And the data proves it.

When 74% of your workforce is either leaving or unsure, the problem isn't the people. It's the profession. Or more accurately, it's the conditions surrounding the profession. Teaching is extraordinary work. The way we've structured it in this country is not.

You Have Permission

If you've read this far, I suspect you needed to hear this. So here it is, as plainly as I can say it.

You're not abandoning your students. You're not a failure. You're not ungrateful or uncommitted or too soft for the job.

You're someone whose skills outgrew a system that was never built to contain them.

The question isn't whether you should leave. It's what you'll build next.

Every lesson you planned. Every difficult conversation you navigated. Every time you stayed back until 6pm to make sure tomorrow would be better for your students. That wasn't wasted time. That was training. And it prepared you for more than you realise.

Teaching taught you how to learn, how to build, how to lead, and how to care deeply about doing good work. Those things don't disappear when you hand back your lanyard.

They go with you. Wherever you go next.

You Don't Have to Figure This Out Alone

There are hundreds of Australian teachers in the Teach Yourself Out community on Skool, right now, working through exactly this. Translating their skills. Exploring new paths. Supporting each other through the messy, exciting, terrifying process of building something new.

It's free. It's real. And it's full of people who get it because they've lived it.

Join the free TYO community on Skool →

You've spent your career helping other people grow. It's your turn now.