Australia's Teacher Shortage Is Among the Worst in the OECD. The Government's Fix Won't Work.

The Australian Education Union's federal data and the OECD's Education at a Glance 2025 report tell the same story from different angles. Australia is running out of qualified teachers. The shortage is concentrated in secondary schools, in STEM subjects, in regional and remote communities, and in the schools that serve the highest-needs students. It is measurable, it is worsening, and it is not going to be solved by the current response.

If you're a teacher right now, you're probably nodding. You can feel it in the class sizes, in the relief teaching days that don't get covered, in the colleagues who've left and haven't been replaced. The shortage isn't abstract to you. It's the extra duty period you're covering. It's the year 10 science class being taught by someone whose specialty is PE.

What matters for your decision, if you're thinking about whether to stay or leave, is understanding what the shortage means structurally. Because the government's response to it has direct implications for whether teaching gets better or worse in the next five years.

What the OECD Data Shows

OECD Education at a Glance 2025 places Australia in the group of nations facing the most severe teacher supply challenges. Across secondary education, Australia has a higher proportion of schools reporting difficulty filling teaching positions than the OECD average. The shortfall is most acute in mathematics, science, and technology at years 9 to 12, but it extends across the board.

The OECD analysis identifies two root causes driving shortages in countries like Australia. The first is a long-term decline in enrolments in initial teacher education programmes. Fewer people are choosing teaching as a career, and the pipeline is thinner. The second is attrition: qualified teachers are leaving the workforce faster than they're being replaced.

Australia's attrition numbers are among the worst in the OECD. When half of graduate teachers leave within five years, and when nearly half of all current teachers are considering leaving in the next 12 months, the pipeline doesn't just need to be wider. It needs to be dramatically wider to compensate for the volume of people exiting.

AITSL's June 2025 report on the teaching workforce confirmed that demand for teachers will continue to outpace supply across all states and territories through the remainder of this decade, with shortfalls most severe in secondary schools and in rural and regional areas.

The Government's Response

The federal government and state governments have put money into teacher recruitment campaigns. The headline figure across various state and federal initiatives is approximately $10 million allocated to attracting new entrants to teaching, including career change campaigns targeted at professionals in other industries.

The recruitment campaigns are not the problem. Attracting new teachers is a reasonable thing to do.

The problem is that recruitment campaigns do not address retention. You can fill the pipeline at one end and the attrition at the other end will drain it just as fast. If the working conditions that caused half of all graduate teachers to leave within five years don't change, the new graduates recruited by the campaigns will face the same conditions, and the same proportion will leave.

"Investment in recruitment without corresponding investment in retention is not a workforce strategy. It is an expensive delay."
— AEU Federal, teacher workforce strategy analysis, 2024–2025

The structural issues driving attrition (workload, class sizes, administrative burden, pay relative to comparable professions, and autonomy over professional practice) have not been the focus of major reform. A handful of state-level initiatives have made incremental adjustments to planning time or targeted pay increases. None of these are at the scale required to change the fundamental calculus teachers are making.

The International Comparison

Looking at countries that have stabilised their teacher workforces is instructive. Finland, Singapore, and Canada's Ontario province are the most cited examples, and they have a few things in common.

Teaching in those systems is a genuinely selective, high-status profession with competitive pay relative to other graduate careers. Class sizes are lower than in Australia. Planning and collaboration time is built into the school schedule rather than being carved out of personal time. Administrative compliance requirements are lighter. Professional autonomy is higher: teachers are trusted to design and adapt curriculum rather than implement scripted programmes.

None of these things happened by accident. They were the result of sustained policy investment over decades, with a clear understanding that the conditions of the job determine whether good people choose it and stay in it.

Australia is moving in a different direction on several of these metrics. Administrative requirements have increased. Compliance frameworks have grown. The accountability structures around teaching have expanded. Some of these changes were intended to improve quality. Their effect on the workforce has been to increase load without increasing capacity.

Why the Structural Problems Will Get Worse

The shortage creates a feedback loop that is hard to exit once it takes hold.

When there aren't enough teachers, class sizes increase and relief teaching coverage drops. When class sizes increase and relief coverage drops, workload for remaining teachers goes up. When workload goes up, more teachers consider leaving. When more teachers leave, the shortage deepens.

This loop is already operating in parts of the Australian system. Secondary schools in regional areas are reporting it most acutely. Principals in some schools are teaching classes themselves to cover gaps. In a handful of documented cases from 2024 and 2025, schools have suspended specialist subjects because there are no qualified teachers to deliver them.

The AITSL projections suggest the shortage will worsen before it improves, with the peak shortfall period expected in the late 2020s as the post-pandemic exodus of experienced teachers (many of whom delayed retirement during COVID disruptions) materialises.

The government's recruitment spend may slightly reduce the peak shortfall. Without equivalent investment in retention, it won't resolve it.

What This Means If You're Deciding Whether to Stay

This is the piece that matters for teachers as individuals.

A system in structural decline is a different working environment from a system in temporary difficulty. Temporary difficulty can be waited out. If the shortage were a short-term blip caused by an unusual event, and conditions were likely to improve in two to three years, staying and weathering it would be a reasonable choice.

The evidence doesn't support that picture. The OECD data, the AITSL projections, and the policy response all suggest that teaching conditions in Australia will be at least as difficult in 2028 and 2029 as they are now, and probably more difficult in secondary schools and regional areas.

If you're a mid-career teacher making a decision, you're not weighing "difficult now versus better later." You're weighing "difficult now versus also difficult in five years," with whatever compounding effect the intervening years have on your health, your career options, and your capacity to make a transition on your own terms.

That's a different calculation. And many teachers, when they understand the structural picture rather than just the immediate experience, make a different decision with that information in hand.

The Opportunity in the Structural Gap

There is a genuine opportunity in the mismatch between teaching skills and how they're valued inside versus outside the classroom.

Experienced teachers leaving the system are moving into roles that directly serve education from the outside: curriculum design at edtech companies, L&D in corporate settings, instructional design for online learning providers, policy work in education departments, and training facilitation across industries. These roles pay more than classroom teaching and operate under better conditions.

As the shortage deepens and education systems look for ways to extend the reach of qualified teachers without requiring physical presence in classrooms, roles at the intersection of teaching expertise and technology or content development will grow. Teachers who understand AI tools, digital pedagogy, and learning design are already finding that demand for their skills outside the classroom outpaces demand within it.

This is not a silver lining for a broken system. The broken system is still broken and the students inside it still deserve better. It is, though, an honest description of where the market for teacher skills is heading, and it's information worth having if you're making a career decision.

Making a Decision With Clear Eyes

If you're reading this because you're trying to figure out whether the system is going to get better, the honest answer is: probably not on a timeline that changes your day-to-day experience in the next three to five years.

If you're looking for permission to factor that into your career decision, you have it. You're a professional assessing a structural situation in your industry. That's exactly what professionals are supposed to do.

The Teach Yourself Out community has teachers at every stage of this process, from "I'm thinking about it" to "I left last year and here's what happened." If you want to work through the decision with people who understand both the system you're in and the options outside it, that's where we are.

The government's fix won't come in time for most teachers making this decision right now. You don't have to wait for it.