The federal government recently announced isolation rules for teachers will be relaxed once term one starts at the end of January and early February across the country. Now teachers who are close contacts will not need to isolate if they show no symptoms and have recorded a negative rapid antigen test. This measure was put in place in part to mitigate the extensive teacher shortage looming over 2022.

Over the past two years of the pandemic, schools struggled to fill teacher gaps with casual and relief teachers. And with the Omicron variant now causing major absences across many industries, the situation will likely be far worse.

As Rachel Wilson and Giuseppe Carabetta write, Australia’s teaching workforce was already in crisis before the pandemic, due to a lack of respect for teachers, problems with recruitment, poor pay (relative to other professions), a high workload and fewer graduates from teaching degrees. Leaked documents from the NSW education department last year reportedly show the state’s public schools will “run out of teachers in the next five years”.

And unlike many other countries, which are currently dealing with major Omicron-induced shortages, Australia has no national plan for how to recruit and retain the teacher workforce desperately needed for our economic recovery and growth. Without this, short-term measures won’t be enough to meet the disruptions we’re likely to see this year, and into the future.

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