Author: Julie Permezel
Permezel, Julie, 2025 To what extend are policy framings of 'teacher shortage' driven by the marketised nature of the Australian school system?, Flinders University, College of Business, Government and Law
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This paper explores how Australian government policy frames the issue of “teacher shortage”, and the extent to which the marketised nature of the school system accounts for this. Some studies in the international literature suggest that marketisation of school systems may increase inequity amongst schools. Government concern with equity and performance in schools is associated with top-down compliance and accountability, which may result in attrition due to increased workload and loss of autonomy for teachers. An exploration of Australian government data sources found that there are different estimates on the extent of a general teacher shortage, but sources appear to agree that teacher supply is unevenly distributed, and is insufficient for demand in certain areas of need. In this thesis, Australian policy framings of “teacher shortage” are elaborated through Framework Analysis of four contemporary government reports, triangulated with a simple count of key words taken from the international literature on teacher shortages. The analysis finds that the government documents, which are very concerned about equity and performance of students, frame “teacher shortage”, for the most part, as an issue of insufficient teacher quality to deal with student inequity and insufficient quality graduates from quality initial teacher education to go to areas of need, with pre-retirement attrition also of some concern. They do not discuss the marketised nature of the school education system, nor differences in equity and performance based on school sector, when it can be reasonably assumed that marketisation is one factor influencing equity amongst schools. There is also limited attention paid to the impact of top-down compliance and accountability on teacher attrition. This thesis recommends firstly, government intervention to address the marketised nature of the school system in the form of full School Resourcing Standard (SRS) funding for government schools; secondly, collecting and making readily available teacher supply and demand data by sector to make visible the system dynamics from this perspective; and thirdly, to replace the one-way, top-down model of accountability and compliance with a more agile, two-way system.
Keywords: accountability, attrition, Australia, autonomy, compliance, disadvantage, government, equity, initial teacher education, marketised, quality, schools, teacher shortage, workload
Subject: Policy and Administration thesis
Thesis type: Masters
Completed: 2025
School: College of Business, Government and Law
Supervisor: Professor Gerry Redmond