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 Impacting Teacher Burnout

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.

Teacher Burnout Statistics

If this all feels a bit dramatic, the numbers suggest it is not dramatic enough.

In Australia, early career attrition is no longer an urban myth whispered in staffrooms. Recent national data shows that while only around 5–6 per cent of teachers exit in their first five years of registration, cumulative attrition over those early years can climb toward 25–35 per cent in some studies. In New South Wales, system data shows almost one in five permanent teachers are now quitting in their first five years, with resignations doubling in just two years. That is not a trickle of turnover. It is a structural leak.

Intentions to leave tell an even sharper story. AITSL’s Australian Teacher Workforce Data reports that more than a third of teachers intend to leave before retirement, and over a third of those plan to do so within the next five years. Surveys of early career teachers show almost half have seriously considered leaving within their first year in the classroom. When your future leadership pipeline is looking for the exit, that is not simply an HR issue. That is a strategy issue.

Burnout and stress sit underneath those intentions. A national survey led by UNSW found that 90 per cent of Australian teachers report severe stress, with nearly 70 per cent describing their workload as unmanageable and rates of depression and anxiety around three times the national norm. A Black Dog Institute study of 4,000 teachers found that 70 per cent reported unmanageable workloads and that most recent sick days were due to mental health or emotional difficulties. Other research during and after the pandemic has suggested that around four in five teachers feel burnt out, with roughly a third describing their burnout as extreme.

Crucially, teaching is not simply “as stressful” as other jobs. It is measurably worse. Deakin University research found government school teachers scoring significantly higher for burnout and stress than the average Australian worker. Bond University studies and international reviews have repeatedly shown that teachers experience more work-related stress, burnout and psychological distress than other occupations, and that teaching ranks among the most demanding human service professions. More recent global comparisons place Australian teachers near the top of the world for workplace stress, with close to 60 per cent reporting “quite a bit” or “a lot” of stress in their job, well above the OECD average.

When you put those numbers together, burnout stops looking like an unfortunate side effect of ambitious strategy. It becomes a leading indicator of strategic failure. If a significant slice of your workforce is considering leaving, and the majority are operating above clinically concerning stress levels, any strategic plan that treats wellbeing supports as optional is misreading the risk.

Misdiagnosing the Teacher 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 People Resourcing Looks Like

If we’re serious about school strategy to resolve teacher burnout, 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. Teacher 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.

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