Every time the teacher shortage hits the news, the answer comes back the same way: pay them more. It is a fair instinct. Teaching is skilled work, the pay has lagged behind other professions with similar training, and nobody should have to take a vow of poverty to teach your kids to read.
But several states have lifted teacher salaries over the past few years, and schools are still scrambling for staff in February. Casual pools are thin. Subjects get merged. Classes get covered by whoever is free. If money were the whole story, that would have started to turn around by now.
Here is what money does not buy back.
Ask a teacher who has walked away why they went, and pay is rarely the first thing they say. They talk about the hours that sit outside the timetable. Marking at 9pm. Reports. Data entry. Emails from parents at all hours that now count as normal. Compliance tasks that arrived one at a time, each one reasonable on its own, and never left.
A pay rise does not remove a single one of those tasks. It just changes the price a teacher is being paid to keep doing them. For someone already working two unpaid hours a night, an extra few thousand a year reads as an offer to stay in a job that is quietly eating their evenings. Plenty of them do the maths and say no.
Behaviour in classrooms has got harder, and teachers say so openly now in a way they did not twenty years ago. So has the level of complex need in the average room, without the specialist support to match it. A teacher managing a class where two or three students need one-on-one help, with no aide and no realistic referral pathway, is not underpaid so much as unsupported.
When a teacher is abused by a student or a parent and the response from above is vague, no salary band fixes that. What they wanted was backing.
Fewer school leavers are choosing teaching, and a large share of those who start the degree never finish it or never enter a classroom. Prac placements are often unpaid, which pushes out exactly the mature-age career changers who tend to make steady, durable teachers.
Then there is the part nobody enjoys saying out loud. Young people have watched teachers get talked about as a problem for a decade. They have seen the headlines, the political fights over curriculum, the talkback callers. If the public story about a job is that it is thankless, a better starting salary does not undo that story.
There is a version of "pay teachers more" that does help. Paying for release time so planning happens during the day rather than at night. Paying teacher aides properly so they stay. Paying for placements. Paying incentives that are big enough and reliable enough to actually move someone to a regional town, along with housing they can live in.
There is another version that mostly shifts numbers on a payslip and changes nothing about Tuesday. That version buys a news cycle and a short bump in applications, then the same people leave for the same reasons about eighteen months later.
Honest answer: we do not know how much of the current shortage is workload, how much is behaviour and support, how much is housing and cost of living in the places that need staff most, and how much is the profession's reputation. It varies by state, by sector and by subject. Maths and science shortages are a different problem from a general primary shortage in a remote town.
That uncertainty is a reason to try several things at once and measure them, not a reason to do the easiest thing and declare it solved.
If you have kids in school, you have more influence here than you think.
None of this means teachers should accept lower pay. They should not, and the pay argument is worth having on its own terms. But we should stop treating a salary increase as the fix, because we have now run that experiment often enough to see what it does and does not achieve.
A teacher who is paid well and still leaves after four years has told us something. The sensible response is to listen to the reason they gave, rather than the reason that is easiest to fund.
This is exactly what TPAA helps members through every day. If any of this sounds like your week, call us on 1300 252 777 or email hotline@tpaa.asn.au for support.