When teachers leave the profession, we often reach for familiar explanations: stress, workload, student behaviour, even changing societal values. But what if the real cause was simpler and more systemic? What if burnout isn’t caused by too much change, but by too little support for change?

That reframing might sound uncomfortable, especially for school leaders committed to the well-being of their staff. But it’s a necessary discomfort. Because when strategy fails to translate into resourcing, it doesn’t just sputter out—it pushes the burden of execution onto the nearest available person.

Usually, that’s the teacher.

The Weight of Invisible Work

A recent article in The Educator underscores a quietly escalating crisis. In the absence of a centralised approach to curriculum resourcing, many teachers are creating their materials from scratch. Some estimate this is adding an extra 12 hours of work each week—hours that don't appear on a timesheet but always appear in wellbeing surveys.

As one school leader bluntly said, “We’ve created a system where autonomy has become abandonment.”

There’s a persistent myth in education that centralised resources stifle creativity. The truth is that high-quality, editable materials don’t restrict autonomy—they protect it. When teachers are given the tools to build on, rather than start from zero, they spend more time refining practice and less time reinventing wheels. That’s not bureaucratic—that’s strategic.

Strategy Isn’t a PDF

Too often, we treat strategy as a document: a roadmap, a vision, a plan. But strategy isn’t a noun—it’s a verb. It has to do things. It has to move. And for it to move, it needs infrastructure.

A strategic plan to reduce mid-air errors wouldn’t stop at a catchy slogan or a new checklist in aviation. It would involve redesigning cockpit layouts, updating training simulators, and rewriting protocols. In education? We’re rolling out transformational strategies with little more than goodwill, PD days, and the occasional laminated placemat.

It’s not enough to ask: What’s our goal? Schools must also ask: What are the execution enablers? What systems, materials, and capacities will allow this strategy to land in practice, not just live on a SharePoint page?

Misdiagnosing the Burnout Problem

The Educator article hints at a deeper truth: the problem isn’t teacher resistance. It’s system resistance. We’ve become oddly comfortable with ambitious strategies that have no backend support.

And so, teachers improvise. They fill in the gaps. They write curriculum, troubleshoot IT, differentiate endlessly, and implement new initiatives with little more than a briefing. Then, when things fall short, the post-mortem labels it “change fatigue.”

Change isn’t exhausting. Unsupported change is.

What Strategic Resourcing Looks Like

If we’re serious about school strategy, resourcing can’t be an afterthought. It has to be embedded.

Here’s what that might look like:

• A resourcing appendix in every strategic plan that outlines tools, templates, and time allocations. For example, this might include access to essential teaching software like Edrolo, Canva for Education, ChatGPT, or assessment platforms such as PAT or NAPLAN analytics dashboards. Too often, teachers must navigate convoluted procurement processes—or worse, dip into personal funds—to secure digital tools that enhance learning. A well-structured appendix would pre-approve these subscriptions, allocate funding, and designate point staff for onboarding. It could also earmark release time for teachers to trial new apps, share insights through peer-led mini-labs, and contribute to a central repository of rated tools. In short, it turns individual experimentation into collective progress.
• Shared curriculum libraries with high-quality, customisable units co-designed with staff. Schools could go further by establishing communities of practice with scheduled time release, allowing staff to collaboratively explore, evaluate, and scale innovations that work.
• Professional learning that continually happens after implementation, not just before it. For example, once a new formative assessment strategy is rolled out, teachers could participate in fortnightly debriefs to share what's working in real classrooms. Similarly, suppose a new literacy framework is adopted. In that case, schools might host live coaching sessions during teaching weeks, drawing on video observation tools like Swivl or integrating peer feedback platforms like TeachFX. This moves professional learning from a pre-launch event to an embedded routine—less about compliance, more about continuous craft.
• An audit process that asks: Which parts of this strategy are under-resourced?

None of these are radical ideas. They’re just rarely done with discipline. We underestimate how much friction and failure stem not from resistance, but from omission.

Closing the Strategy-Execution Gap

School leaders rightly spend a lot of time talking about vision. But an unsupported vision is just a hallucination.

If teachers are drowning, it’s not because the tide of change is too strong. It’s because we forgot to build the boats. Burnout isn’t a people problem. It’s a planning problem. It’s the predictable result of putting the weight of strategy onto people without first putting the right tools in their hands.

We must also acknowledge that every time a new initiative, meeting, or expectation is introduced, it takes up space in an already-crowded workload. Even the best-intentioned changes can become burdensome if they aren’t accompanied by a conscious effort to remove or reprioritise existing demands. Part of the resourcing solution isn’t just adding support—it’s creating capacity. Leaders must ask: What can we take away to make space for this to succeed? Because unless we’re willing to let go of the old, the new will only add weight.

So, pause before writing the next big goal if you're drafting your next plan. Ask instead: what will this require of our people, and are we willing to resource it properly?

Because if the strategy matters, the support must too.