As ATAR scores dominate headlines, the work of teachers remains largely invisible. They are central to education and social cohesion, yet underpaid, overworked and routinely taken for granted.

Recently Year 12 students around the country have been celebrating or lamenting their ATAR scores. The celebrating students are featured in the media; the lamenters are mostly silent. But where are their teachers?

In Scandinavian and East Asian cultures, teachers are highly respected and their work is prized. In China, Korea and Japan, for instance, there are special days set aside annually to celebrate their teachers. Meanwhile, in Australia the work that teachers do is frequently devalued – evidence that the country is going backward educationally. We need to change.

The teaching profession in Australia is mostly regulated at state and territory levels but it’s funded mainly by the federal government. The result is a crazy mismatch of regulations and educational standards across state and territory borders and wide disparities in pay and conditions. Adding to this confusion are the urban-rural and public-private divides in all the states and territories.

An accurate comparison of the work of teachers with that of other professionals (doctors and lawyers, for example) illustrates just how poorly they are remunerated and how often their work is under-valued. Their conditions of work come nowhere near to reflecting the value of what they achieve for society and the economy.

Meanwhile, they are forever time-poor, each day struggling to complete mindless administrative paperwork while attending to their classrooms. They have to grade essays, mark tests and exam papers, and prepare lessons in their own time. The  curricula they are obliged to teach are mainly designed by bureaucrats with little experience in classrooms or direct knowledge of the needs and expectations of students.

It is galling that so many of the well-endowed private schools attract generous government subsidies, while government schools are serially under-resourced, especially in areas of socio-economic disadvantage – a major cause of the growing inequality that is white-anting social cohesion across the country today. This constitutes a glaring public policy failure at state and federal levels. Teachers are regularly faced with the fall-out in their classrooms where they’re expected to be therapists as well as pedagogues. Rates of student abuse and violence directed at teachers are increasing. Then there are the verbally abusive and physically violent parents, many (probably most) of whom are projecting on to teachers their own failings as parents.

Little wonder that the burn-out rate of teachers is high, especially among early entrant to the profession who are leaving it in disillusioned droves.

What is to be done?

Obviously teachers need to be far better paid. And schools (mainly in the government and Catholic school sectors) need to be far better resourced. One of the great stupidities of the neoliberal era has been to label educators and educations systems as a cost to the nation. That neoliberal slander has to be buried; it’s been dead for a long time. Education is an investment. Moreover, government expenditure on education must be focused on schools, not on bureaucrats in government departments intent on maintaining their perks and power.

Cutting the administrative burdens teachers have to bear must also be a high priority for policymakers. For example, the paperwork that has to be filled out by teachers to take students on excursions is frankly mind-boggling. Report writing about teaching methods, about individual students, much of which ends up gathering dust in education departments, needs to be reduced or cut altogether. And then there is the task of having to respond in writing and in person to incessant queries and demands from parents. Administrative assistants should be available at department or regional levels, or even in the schools themselves, to relieve teachers of the bulk of this indefensible administrivia.

Teachers need to be given time out every five years or so – a kind of sabbatical leave – to update their qualifications through further study and to compare their teaching methods and curricula in other schools, in Australia and overseas. Again, this should been seen as an investment not a cost for education budgets.

It is well-documented that there are some serious mental health issues affecting students in schools in contemporary Australia, and the rate is increasing. Teachers are on the front-line of this crisis. They are expected to handle the resulting disruptions in class, the anti-social behaviours, the noise, and even tragedies that can occur as a result of the severe mental health struggles that some students are experiencing. But teachers are not trained to be therapists. Their role is that of the pedagogue. Every school should have access to educational psychologists and allied mental health workers who can step in when needed.

It’s time to stop denigrating and start celebrating the vital work that that teachers do in this country. Teachers encourage their students to recognise and value their individuality and the potential within themselves – attributes which they’ve often not been aware of until their teachers reveal those qualities to them. They prepare their students with skills and knowledge needed in the wide world once they leave school. Fools would have us believe that the work of teachers can be performed by a set of AI algorithms. If you believe that nonsense the next thing they’ll want us to believe is that AI can take over parenting.

The country’s political leaders, media organisations and the general public must wake up to the fact that the two most important contributors to our civilisation are good parents and good teachers. All other professions and trades rank below them. Australia needs to recognise people in both categories and reward them accordingly. There are teaching awards, but the criteria for identifying potential recipients are opaque and often meaningless – or worse, they trivialise the profound art of good teaching. A more heuristic approach to identifying excellence in the teaching profession is urgently needed. And the recognition and the rewards it should bring should be superior to all other award systems, including sporting awards, celebrity awards, and the Australian honours system.