In the context of the Queensland Teachers Union’s current struggle against the state government’s manufactured crisis, underfunding and exploitation of teachers’ passion, Luke Robinson outlines the demands of the strike actions. Drawing on practical lessons from the Finnish education model, Luke argues that teachers need to be valued properly.
Each day, more than 600,000 students attend Queensland public schools, supported by over 56,000 teachers. These raw numbers mask a system at breaking point, stretched beyond capacity, and with growing inequality. In 2023, over 2.49 million behavioural incidents were recorded through the OneSchool system in Queensland public schools alone, a beacon of warning of the mounting pressures in the classroom and a workforce systematically under supported. These are just the reported behaviour incidents, where far too many are not reported.
Teachers are burning out, students are falling behind, and schools are falling apart with resignations at twice the rate of replacement. Despite this, year after year, EBA after EBA, governments continue to paint over the cracks instead of addressing the damaged foundation.
It has been 14 years since the Gonski Review recommended needs-based funding for all schools, yet Queensland schools are not projected to receive their fair share of funding until 2034, an astonishing 23 years after the original recommendation. In that time, two entire cohorts of students will have moved through the education system without ever receiving the resources they deserve. The reality is clear, public education is a profession in a manufactured crisis: it has been systemically underfunded, overburdened, and politically neglected for far too long
The price of political centrism
The year is 2009, and Anna Bligh’s Labor government is negotiating the education EBA with the Queensland Teacher’s Union (QTU). As with the modern strike action, the fight was for better pay and conditions, however the union was prevented from further action by the government having the Industrial Relations Commission blocking all strike action.
Over the past 15 years teachers’ voiced have been silenced, with any industrial actions stifled. Instead, the governments have tinkered around the edges, providing marginal pay increases without addressing any other issues. Today, teachers are responsible for managing classes of up to 28 or more students with vastly differing learning needs. Concurrently, teachers are managing increasing levels of occupational violence whilst suffering conditions akin to modern slavery, with approximately 1 in 7 teachers working over 60 hours a week despite only being paid for 25 duty hours.
52,000 teachers haven’t voted to strike just for the fun of it. It is clear that teachers see they are overworked, underappreciated, under supported, and under resourced. Despite progressive policies like the “Right to Disconnect” and workplace protections for psychosocial wellbeing being enshrined into industrial relations law, teachers are functionally excluded from such protections.
Many are forced to work late into the night, on weekends, on holidays, sacrifice their unpaid lunch for supervision duties, attend meetings and professional development in their own time, and more to meet the growing demands and needs of the job. This isn’t just teachers being dedicated to the job. This is a government seeing a cohort of people who are passionate about supporting their students, and exploiting that passion. Until drastic change happens and the State government legitimately values teachers, their time, and their roles, the profession will continue to bleed talent.
Teacher pay: the first of many fixes
While some would say “it’s not just about the pay”, addressing the inequalities in teacher pay is a necessary starting point. Currently, teachers are paid for 25 working hours each week, despite regularly clocking up more than 60 hours. This discrepancy is unacceptable and would not be tolerated in any other sector. The simplest and most straightforward action to take would be to adjust teacher salaries to reflect the standard 38 hour full-time week, in line with other professions. This must be done so without requiring teachers to be physically at school any longer. This step is a small but significant move toward fairly compensating teachers and sending a strong message of recognition and respect.
More than this, allocated non-contact time in school has not been meaningfully updated in over 50 years. The current 210 minutes each week is grossly inadequate for the demands of the job, and is quite often co-opted by relief supervisions or meetings. In an effort to meaningfully rebuild trust with our public education sector, the state government must commit to:
- Paying teachers in line with hours actually worked
- Doubling non-contact time
- Guaranteeing the “Right to Disconnect” for teachers
- Hiring enough teaching and support staff so existing teachers aren’t continuously spread impossibly thin.
Teachers are required to do vast amounts of work in preparation of doing their job, which we can and should be supporting. Teachers need to be enabled to do what they do best, teach. To do this we need to upend the structures currently limiting them from being able to do this.
The black dog: mental health in education
The overwhelming workload, escalating stress, and unrelenting demands of the teaching profession compound to exact a massive toll on the mental health of educators. A recent UNSW study published in August 2025 revealed, quite startlingly, that 90% of teachers are experiencing extreme stress, and nearly 70% report their workload being unmanageable. Using standardised testing methods, teachers score three times higher for depression and four times higher for stress than the national average. This isn’t a small group of people experiencing difficulties in the workplace, this is systemic government neglect.
For decades, teachers have been ignored, dismissed, undervalued, and shut down whenever they raise concerns. Two cases clearly illustrate some of the impacts of teacher neglect, where we see a pattern of overwork, and a culture of minimising the work teachers do. In Doulis v State of Victoria [2014] VSC 395, a teacher faced large, homogenous classrooms of low literacy students, combined with excessive workload, and no meaningful support, leading to severe mental health crises, including repeated suicide attempts. Similarly, in Bersee v State of Victoria (Department of Education and Training) [2022] VSCA 231, the court recognised the failures of the State government in causing a psychiatric injury when the EBA increased class sizes without reducing workload. While the school had provided adjustment and accommodation for the teacher, it was clear the impact larger class sizes directly had on health and safety.
The human cost is staggering: burnout, breakdowns, lives lost, or permanent and ongoing psychiatric injury. Governments, as the employer for public school teachers, have continued to demand increased productivity and output while offering consistently less. Burnout is not personal weakness, but is a predictable failing of a public education system structured to demand more than it is possible for any individual to give. We know the harm these pressures cause teachers, otherwise schools wouldn’t make individual adjustments. It is long past time for these adjustments to become universal. Mental health protections must be built into the system itself through structural reform and through full funding.
Classroom working conditions are learning conditions
Classroom size is more than a staffing issue, it is an issue of educational equity. Teachers in metropolitan schools have reported class sizes of up to 60 students for a term due to staffing challenges. These problems are particularly exacerbated in regional or other hard-to-staff schools. With numbers like that no teacher, regardless of their skill, care, passion, or experience, can meet the needs of all students. This stark reality is highlighted frequently in low socioeconomic schools, which aren’t resourced at a level that supports their success. Kids across the board are falling behind in critical areas like literacy, numeracy, and civics due to the failure of successive governments to adequately invest in the future. The most recent assessments found only 28% of Year 10 students are proficient in civics and citizenship, the lowest result since recording began. The implication is clear that we are failing to equip our young people with the knowledge and skills necessary to participate in Australian democracy.
The writing has been on the wall for years now, we must take action to create equity for young people across Queensland. To achieve these outcomes, we must:
- Cap class sizes at 20 students.
- Provide permanent, full time teacher aides in classrooms with complex needs.
- Fully fund schools to 100% of the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) immediately.
Teacher working conditions are the learning conditions of young people. The sooner the State government realises this, the sooner we can get the support desperately needed in the sector.
A curriculum for the future
For over 15 years, teachers and unions have raised concerns about the distorting effects of standardised tests like NAPLAN. Rather than promoting a culture of learning, these tests create unnecessary competition and division between schools, narrows the curriculum to meet the needs of the test, and disproportionately penalises students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Simultaneously, core skills like civics are squeezed into an already bloated HASS curriculum, whilst other essential skills like financial literacy and workers rights aren’t taught at all.
Compare this to recent developments in the UK, where the voting age is being lowered to 16. When only one in four Australian Year 10 students can demonstrate basic civics knowledge, it is clear we are setting young people up to fail. How can we expect our young people to shape the future and participate in democracy if we don’t bother to engage them in it?
It is time we consider the structure and consistency of “Extended Care” or “Access” classes in secondary schools and implement a defined curriculum. This class could and should be utilised to engage students with the essential skills needed for their future including civics and democratic participation, climate and ecological literacy, workers’ rights and the union movement, and financial comprehension. This isn’t “radical” in other countries, with Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence focusing on similar themes of sustainability and political literacy. A modern education system shouldn’t just prepare students for tests, but should prepare them for life.
Lessons from abroad
While it is essential to rework our education system, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Looking to countries like Finland can provide us critical guidance. Finland consistently ranks amongst countries with the top educational outcomes, and has eliminated wealth inequalities in education. The success of Finland is something Queensland, and Australia, could learn from and implement. What Finland does that we could readily adopt includes:
- Smaller classes: on average Finland has 7 less students per teacher.
- More non-contact time: Finnish teachers on average have double the non-contact time each week of Queensland teachers, with Queensland teachers only guaranteed 2.5 hours to Finland’s 5 hours each week.
- Less admin: Finnish teachers have, significantly less administrative work in comparison to Queensland teachers, with Australian teachers spending 6.5 hours on management and administration, and 15.9 hours on lesson planning compared to Finland’s 1.4 and 10 hours respectively.
- Full funding: schools in Finland are entirely free to the user, including fully funded school meals for every student.
Both Australia and Finland share similar student instruction hours and parent-teacher contact time, however Finland enables teachers to engage in co-teaching, with reports of a 42% uptake. The key difference is the value Finland gives to the teaching profession, and the structure they have built for teachers’ work-life balance. This includes a co-teaching structure which gives teachers more flexibility and freedom at school to do the work necessary to teach the curriculum. This isn’t some radical utopian thinking, rather is pragmatic policymaking that invests in people, backed by decades of research and evidence. Australia can and should be seeking to learn from systems that put people first.
A generation failed: questions we must answer
When the Gonski Review was handed down in 2011, it clearly outlined a blueprint for a fairer, more equitable, needs-based funding system to correct imbalances between public and private schools. Fourteen years later, and Queensland finally commits to being the last state to achieve minimum public school funding levels by 2034. This is an entire generation of students failed by successive governments. This means millions of young people have gone through the entirety of their schooling without the minimum funding needed for their success. An entire generation of public-school teachers have been consistently and regularly failed by their employer. This isn’t accidental. It is a result of sustained and ongoing political failure from both major parties. This is glaringly obvious from the policy platforms brought forward by each party at the 2024 Queensland state election:
- The Liberal-National Party promised 550 additional teacher aides, funding for an anti-bullying campaign, and some additional professional development.
- Queensland Labor promised free lunches for primary schools, a policy they were accused by the LNP of copying from the Queensland Greens.
- Queensland Greens committed to free school breakfasts and lunches for all public schools, promised to abolish school fees, promised to achieve 100% SRS funding within 12 months, promised to reduce class sizes and increase teacher pay, and promised to provide vouchers to parents to reduce the costs of uniforms, laptops, and excursions.
The question consistently asked by both major parties is the neoliberal “can we afford to fix public education?”. This is the wrong question and fails to value the people these governments represent. The question that should be asked is: “how can we afford and justify not fixing public education?”.
Reclaiming education as a public service
Governments across Australia talk endlessly about reform: they talk about youth justice, they talk about workplace rights, they talk about a “future-focused economy”, and the State Government talks about “Delivering for Queensland”. None of these goals are achievable if the foundation, public education, is left to fall apart. Tinkering around the edges with tokenistic pay increases, delaying reforms, and delaying funding isn’t acceptable. The solutions aren’t complex, and aren’t hidden behind a veil. We must fund schools to the minimum SRS now, not in 2034. Teachers must be paid for their actual hours worked. Class sizes must be capped. Non-contact time must be expanded. The curriculum must be built to meet the needs of the future. Anything less is inadequate and aggravates the challenges further.
Teachers across public schools undertook the largest single teacher strike in Queensland’s history on August 6 2025. The strike was the result of a complete failure by the LNP state government to negotiate pay and conditions with the teachers union, offering an 8% increase in pay over three years and no meaningful improvement to workplace conditions. The current supplementary offer for teachers includes a payment for any school camps, an additional salary band for teachers with over 14 years of service, one extra student free day, a payment to cover the first year of teacher registration, and an offer for regional teachers to cash in their leave.
While these offers make some movements towards addressing some of the shortfalls in teaching conditions, they do little to address the growing hazards in the workplace. The education minister, John Paul Langbroek, was unaware of what was being asked of the government, and shortly after stated he believed a large contributing factor might have been the large maintenance backlog in public schools. Prior to the strike action, the Queensland Government applied for conciliation through the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission, seemingly reluctant to negotiate further with the QTU. Unfortunately, this tells us the current LNP government either doesn’t seem to or chooses not to understand the crux of the issue and chooses to ignore the evidence in front of them.
Whilst the Union must remain apolitical to be able to negotiate with the government of the day, I sit here questioning why so many union members still support the two major parties, while the Greens policy positions are the only ones that align with the goals and needs of the teachers union. The reforms may seem bold, but they are not radical. What’s radical is expecting a workforce to give everything they have for a system that refuses to support them. What’s radical is allowing a child’s future to be determined by their postcode. If we were brave enough, we would fully fund public education as a promise to all Queenslanders that every child, every teacher, and every future matters.
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As we speak, the QTU have been undertaking conciliation with the Department of Education. The State Government applied to the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission for conciliation on 28 July following the expiry of the prior Bargaining Agreement at 30 June. The conciliation process is closed-doors and discussions are confidential, and both parties are expected to act in good faith.
Under Queensland legislation, the negotiations can be referred to arbitration for the QIRC to make the decision for both parties after at least three months of conciliation, and the outcomes are not likely to be any substantive change to the current offer presented by the LNP. The most recent update to the negotiations have seen no change to the pay proposal, but a piecemeal offer to consult with the QTU on the outcomes of the CRoSR findings, and to set up a safety taskforce. Neither of these provide additional confidence to the teaching cohort that any meaningful improvements will be made to their working environment and conditions.
Complicating the matter here is that if three-year agreements were to be signed now, the next round of negotiations and conciliation would be occurring during the lead up to the 2028 Queensland state election. By their own rigidity and inflexibility, the LNP may have made a rod for their own backs.
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References
1. Queensland Audit Office. Protecting students from bullying. Queensland Audit Office. [Online] 16 December 2024. https://www.qao.qld.gov.au/reports-resources/reports-parliament/protecting-students-bullying.
2. Australian Government. All Queensland state schools on a path to full and fair funding. Ministers’ Media Centre. [Online] 24 March 2025. https://ministers.education.gov.au/anthony-albanese/all-queensland-state-schools-path-full-and-fair-funding.
3. The Australian Council for Educational Research. Queensland Teacher Workload Study. 2018.
4. Queensland Industrial Relations Commission. Teaching in State Education Award 2016 (Reprinted 2025). [Online] 1 September 2025. https://www.qirc.qld.gov.au/sites/default/files/2025-09/teaching_state_ed_010925.pdf.
5. Teachers’ workload, turnover intentions, and mental health: perspectives of Australian teachers. Granziera, Helena, Collie, Rebecca J and Roberts, Anna et al. 149, s.l. : Social Psychology of Education, 29 July 2025, Vol. 28.
6. Black Dog Institute. Teacher mental health and burnout could halve workforce, new data by Black Dog Institute. 2023.
7. Queensland Teachers Union. State Budget Submission 2023-24. 2023.
8. Cassidy, Caitlin. Could you pass a year 10 civics test? Only 28% of Australian students can. The Guardian. 2025.
9. Teachers to snub NAPLAN tests. Mawer, Jessica. s.l. : ABC News, 2010.
10. Queensland teachers told to withdraw own children from Naplan tests as union pushes for reform. Rachwani, Mostafa. s.l. : The Guardian, 2021.
11. ACARA. Civics and Citizenship (Version 8.4). Australian Curriculum. [Online] 2022. https://v8.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/humanities-and-social-sciences/civics-and-citizenship/.
12. Finnish National Agency for Education. Average group sizes in basic education in Finland below the OECD average. Helsinki, Finland : s.n., 2019.
13. QTAD Q&A. Queensland Teachers Union. 1, 12 Feb 2021, Vol. 126.
14. European Education and Culture Executive Agency. Finland: Conditions of service for teachers working in early childhood and school education. s.l. : European Commission, 2024.
15. Queensland Teachers Union. Unpacking the non-contact time clause from the Certified Agreement. 2025.
16. The Educator. Teacher workloads on the rise – report. 2019.
17. European Education and Culture Executive Agency. Finland: Funding in Education. 2024.
18. Finnish National Agency for Education. School meals in Finland. 2025.
19. From autonomous actors to collaborative professionals: perceptions of co-teaching in a Finnish school community. Ahonen, Heini and al, et. 7, s.l. : Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 2024, Vol. 68.
20. Liberal National Party Queensland. More teachers, better education. 2024.
21. McKay, Jack. Queensland Labor promises free lunches for state school students, if re-elected on October 26. s.l. : ABC News, 2024.
22. Queensland Greens. Genuinely free, fully funded public schools. 2024.
23. Dennis, Julius. Queensland Teachers’ Union says improvement in conditions priority ahead of strike, government confident a deal can be reached. ABC News. 2025.
24. Queensland Government. State School Teachers’ Certified Agreement—update. 2025.
25. John-Paul Langbroek unable to list Queensland Teachers’ Union’s key demands 24 hours after strike. Innes, Rose and Mulveney, Mikaela. s.l. : Herald Sun, 2025.
26. Report reveals $441 million backlog of repairs for Queensland state schools. Dobson, Emily. s.l. : ABC News, 2025.
27. EB11 campaign heats up. Mertens, Leah. 6, s.l. : Queensland Teachers Journal, 2025, Vol. 130.
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Luke Robinson lives on Yugambeh country in Queensland with a particular advocacy focus on social democracy, equality and justice, and public services. He has a background in health, people leadership, and community building.