Hey, teacher! Australia's schools need a workforce designed for the future

Australia’s school workforce challenge is often described as a teacher shortage. This is true, but it is not the whole story.

While attracting more teachers remains essential, schools today face a broader set of challenges. They are being asked to respond to more complex student needs, rapid technological change, increasing expectations from families, and growing demand for specialised support. Meeting these challenges requires more than additional teachers. It requires a workforce designed for the future.

The conversation about school workforce reform is evolving. Increasingly, systems are recognising that the future of schooling depends on a broader and more sophisticated workforce model: one that combines teachers, school leaders, allied professionals, specialist staff, technology, new career pathways and the right system-level supports into a coherent whole. Workforce reform is no longer only about filling vacancies. It is about building the workforce architecture schools need for the future: ensuring schools have the right people, with the right capabilities, in the right roles, at the right time, supported by system settings and services that enable them to succeed.

The National Teacher Workforce Action Plan has begun this shift through its focus on workforce planning, retention, professional status and attraction. But the next phase of reform should go further. It should build the workforce architecture schools need for the future: the roles, capabilities, careers, technology and planning arrangements required to meet changing student and community needs.

Traditional workforce discussions often focus almost exclusively on teachers. Yet modern schools rely on a much wider range of expertise. Across Australia, schools are increasingly drawing on counsellors, psychologists, wellbeing practitioners, inclusion specialists, teacher aides, data specialists, curriculum experts and administrative professionals to support student success.

This trend reflects a deeper shift in what schools are expected to provide. Students need high-quality teaching, but increasingly are benefiting from additional wellbeing support, learning adjustments, family engagement, behaviour support, career guidance and access to specialist expertise. At the same time, there is growing debate about whether schools have become the default delivery point for services that might traditionally have sat within health, community or social support systems. 

No single role can carry all of this work. Many schools are grappling with increasing levels of student complexity, including behaviours that can place significant demands on teachers and school leaders. Supporting student wellbeing while also protecting staff wellbeing requires access to a broader range of expertise, supports and services than schools have traditionally relied upon.

Teaching is most effective when teachers can focus on the work that requires their expertise while operating within a broader support ecosystem. A well-designed school workforce should protect the distinctive value of teaching while ensuring schools can access the other capabilities students need.

This means workforce reform should start with a simple question: what capabilities do schools need, and how should those capabilities be organised?

The right model will vary between communities. A remote school, a metropolitan secondary school and a specialist setting may require different combinations of school-based staff, shared specialists and system support. Successful systems will maintain common standards for role quality, professional capability and student safeguards while giving schools flexibility to configure roles and services around local needs.

Broadening the school workforce is only part of the answer; the future workforce challenge is also a career challenge.

Many professions have responded to changing workforce expectations by creating clearer pathways for professional growth, specialisation, mobility and leadership. School systems must do the same. Teaching needs to be seen not only as a vocation, but as a profession that offers diverse and rewarding career opportunities across an entire working life. Systems must create career pathways that attract people into these roles, develop their expertise and allow them to progress without leaving the profession.

Future workforce strategies should include pathways into specialist practice, instructional leadership, coaching, curriculum design, digital learning, inclusion and system leadership. Opportunities should exist for staff to move between schools, sectors, regions and central functions without feeling that career progression requires leaving the profession altogether.

Career pathways matter for attraction and retention, but they also matter because they help systems build the capabilities they will need in the future. Workforce planning and capability development should therefore be viewed as two sides of the same challenge. A future workforce strategy should not simply forecast vacancies. It should deliberately grow the capabilities schools will need.

Technology is one of the major forces reshaping those future capability requirements and career pathways. A broader and more specialised workforce also creates an opportunity to rethink how work in schools is organised, supported and shared.

Artificial intelligence, automation and technology more broadly have the potential to change how work is performed and how expertise is deployed across schools. Some activities may become faster, simpler or more centralised. New roles may emerge. Existing roles may evolve. At the same time, artificial intelligence is creating new challenges for schools and teachers, including questions about assessment, capability development, student engagement with technology and the changing nature of teaching itself.

The opportunity is not simply to digitise existing processes. The opportunity is to design better ways of working. Used well, technology can reduce duplicative effort, support better planning, improve access to expertise and increase the time available for activities that have the greatest impact on students. Realising these benefits, however, will require systems to make deliberate choices about how and when technology is introduced, governed and integrated into teaching and learning.

Technology will not reduce the need for skilled educators. It will increase the value of distinctly human capabilities such as teaching, coaching, mentoring, leadership, relationship building and judgement. We have heard consistently from students that what they value most is a close relationship with their teacher. The design question is not which tasks technology can take from teachers. It is how technology can strengthen the work that matters most, while helping schools navigate the new challenges that technology itself creates.

The changes proposed cannot be addressed one vacancy at a time, or even one training program at a time. They require systems to anticipate the capabilities, roles and workforce models schools will need over the next decade.

Many education systems remain focused on responding to immediate staffing pressures. While understandable, this approach can leave systems constantly reacting rather than preparing. Future-focused workforce planning should provide a clearer understanding of emerging workforce needs, capability gaps, demographic shifts and changing student demand.

This becomes particularly important as schools confront workforce ageing, changing employee expectations, regional workforce pressures, increasing support needs and the emergence of new professional roles. Systems must also respond to growing concerns about workforce wellbeing, particularly where educators are supporting students with increasingly complex needs. The challenge is not only whether there will be enough teachers. It is whether schools will have the right mix of teachers, leaders, specialists and support staff.

Better workforce data will not solve the workforce challenge on its own. But it can help systems move from reaction to preparation. The goal should be a workforce strategy that looks five and ten years ahead, rather than one that continually responds to today’s vacancies.

Australia will not solve its school workforce challenges through recruitment campaigns. The next phase of reform should focus on building a contemporary workforce architecture for schools. That means starting with the capabilities students and schools need, creating career pathways that build those capabilities, using technology to reshape work, and planning far enough ahead to prepare for future demand.

If we want teaching and school leadership to remain attractive professions over the coming decades, we must offer more than a job. We must offer a modern profession with meaningful careers, diverse opportunities and the support required to meet the challenges of an increasingly complex world.

That is the workforce reform agenda that schools need now. It is also the one they will need for the future.

Get in touch to discuss how your system can build a sustainable school workforce for the future.

Connect with Tom Levi, Steph Ryan, and Chris Brown on LinkedIn.