Administrative staffing in Australia’s public education system has grown far faster than student enrolments or teacher numbers. Unless governments act, promised school funding risks being absorbed by bureaucracy rather than improving learning and wellbeing.

Australia’s public education system is facing a growing structural problem: bureaucracy is expanding far faster than the number of students or teachers.

Over the past decade, administrative staffing – both inside schools and across state education departments – has surged. The most dramatic staffing growth has occurred not in classrooms but in state education departments. At the same time, teacher workloads have intensified, student needs have become more complex, and school funding remains insufficient to close long-standing achievement gaps.

National staffing and expenditure data show that administration is consuming an ever-larger share of public school funding. Unless governments contain this growth, billions in additional funding promised under the new Better and Fairer Schools Agreement risk being swallowed by expanding bureaucracies rather than reaching classrooms, where student learning and wellbeing are most affected.

Between 2015 and 2024, non-teaching staff in public schools grew at rates vastly exceeding growth in teacher and student numbers. According to Australian Bureau of Statistics data, non-teaching staff in schools increased by 47.7 per cent and non-school staff by 87.1 per cent, while teachers increased just 16.2 per cent and student enrolments rose 7.4 per cent.

Primary and secondary schools experienced similarly disproportionate trends. In primary schools, non-teaching staff jumped by 44.9 per cent, outpacing student growth of 4.3 per cent and teacher growth of 15.6 per cent. In secondary schools, administrative roles grew by 51.8 per cent, while student numbers rose 12.4 per cent.

The largest increase was among administrative and clerical staff, up 50.4 per cent nationally – seven times the rate of student growth and three times that of teachers. Specialist support staff, including teacher aides, counsellors, youth workers and IT support, grew by 44.5 per cent, reflecting rising student needs but also additional programs and reporting requirements.

Since 2015, the number of departmental executive staff has more than doubled, rising from 635 to 1,331 – an increase of 109.7 per cent. Specialist support roles in central and regional offices also nearly doubled, increasing by 98.9 per cent, while administrative and clerical departmental roles grew by 87.2 per cent.

These increases dwarf the growth in both teachers and students. Executive staff expanded at nearly seven times the rate of teacher growth and 15 times student growth.

The overall result is a major shift in the composition of the public school workforce. Teachers now represent only 62.2 per cent of total staff, down from 68.4 per cent in 2015. Non-teaching roles – both school-based and departmental – now make up 37.8 per cent of the workforce, up from 31.7 per cent in 2015.

Independent reviews in 2024 identified government policy and regulations are driving the expansion of administrative staffing. State education departments are increasingly focused primarily on administrative and compliance roles rather than curriculum, teaching and learning support.

A New South Wales Department of Education audit mapped more than 70 per cent of school operational tasks directly to government policies. It identified 201 separate policies and 361 supporting documents, creating complex, overlapping requirements that schools must interpret and administer. The audit found more than 100 tasks imposed high or very high administrative burden on teachers, including manual paperwork, extensive documentation for student wellbeing, increased curriculum differentiation, and large volumes of data collection.

Similarly, a Victorian review found a “sustained increase in administrative and compliance workload” arising from accumulated regulations that are rarely discarded when new requirements are introduced. The review also warned that the widely promoted model of school autonomy has, in practice, increased the administrative demands placed on principals and teachers.

While governments often emphasise their investment in public education, there is a systemic reallocation of funding away from classrooms and towards bureaucracy. A growing share of school spending is absorbed by non-teaching staff.

Between 2014-15 and 2022-23, expenditure on teacher salaries increased by 48.5 per cent, far outpaced by an 80.6 per cent increase in non-teacher salaries. Non-teacher salaries in public schools increased by 76.7 per cent and by 99.8 per cent for non-teachers in central offices.

In public primary schools, spending on non-teaching staff grew 72 per cent, compared with 47.8 per cent for teachers. In secondary schools, non-teaching expenditure rose 83.3 per cent, compared with 49.5 per cent for teachers. Departmental office salaries grew even more rapidly at 99.8 per cent.

If staffing and expenditure patterns had remained consistent with 2014-15 levels, approximately $1.5 billion more would have been available for teacher salaries in 2022-23 alone. This amounts to 2.8 per cent of the Schooling Resource Standard for public schools.

Despite the rapid growth in administrative staffing in schools, the administrative load on teachers has not eased. The OECD’s TALIS 2024 survey found that Australian lower secondary teachers now spend 4.7 hours per week on administrative tasks – a slight increase from 2018. Their administrative load remains the fourth highest in the OECD.

Similarly, the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership reports that weekly administrative work for primary teachers increased from 5.4 to 6 hours between 2021 and 2023 and from 6 to 6.4 hours for secondary school teachers. Many research studies also show that teachers spend more time on administration.

As with other government services, schools cannot be a regulation free zone. Regulations are necessary for a variety of reasons including student and teachers health and safety, data collection, effective financial management and to meet many other societal and government expectations of public schools. The trick is to decide which are necessary and reasonable and which are unnecessary and wasteful of time and resources.

The NSW and Victorian reviews have made some progress in this. However, government responses so far do not provide much confidence that the administrative burden on schools is being genuinely addressed. Without deeper reform, staffing and expenditure trends are unlikely to shift.

At a time when public schools face profound challenges – persistent underfunding, growing complexity of student needs, large achievement gaps between rich and poor, teacher shortages – Australia can ill-afford to allow bureaucracy to drain more resources from classrooms.

It is imperative that the funding increases flowing from the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement over the next decade, although largely postponed until the last five years, be maximised in support of student learning and well-being. The growth of bureaucracy must be contained to maximise the resources available to employ more teachers and allied professionals.