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    NSW teachers need more lesson preparation time to meet students' complex needs, union says
    Australia

    NSW teachers need more lesson preparation time to meet students' complex needs, union says

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    7 Comments

    1. Frankenclyde on

      Genuinely not trying to be facetious, but is this not a task that AI could support teachers with? Feels like it would be a perfect way to accelerate lesson planning and consider individual student needs even when complex. Teacher still maintains oversight and judgement of course, would just get to the outcome more quickly.

    2. figurative_capybara on

      Pretty clear example of where public defunding of private schools who take a fraction of the more special needs kids could do a world of good providing the extra funding needed for this case.

    3. MildColonialMan on

      This is exactly why I didn’t stay in high school teaching after I got me degree.

      It’s demoralising knowing very well how you could do better but never having the space to do it. I was just constantly, constantly on the back foot.

    5. Ok_Bird705 on

      May be don’t have students with complex needs in the general school population. Let’s be honest, this integrated class approach is not having a benefit for most students.

    6. Annual_Lobster_3068 on

      As a pre-service teacher in their first year of teaching who is currently crying over the first of many Saturdays spent trying to design an entire unit, this article is very timely!

    7. seventrooper on

      I work at an upper SES school on Sydney’s north shore. This is my seventh year as a secondary teacher, and fifth as a year adviser. Of the 18 teaching periods in each week, I’m timetabled to teach 13, which in theory gives me 6.25 hours per week of planning, preparation, admin and professional learning time.

      I have access to banks of resources, LLMs, some admin assistance, an extremely supportive faculty, effective executive support. I teach classes that require less than 5% of my face to face time to be spent on behavioural management. All sounds ideal, until it comes to the breakdown of those classes.

      Of the 96 students I teach, 31 have individualised learning needs. Some have an emerging level of English, some have dyslexia/dysgraphia, some require intensive auditory or vision assistance; most have ADHD/ASD/ODD. Fine tuning details of lessons in each Stage area takes a *lot* of time, and doing it well takes a lot more. Add to that the amount of data collection that’s required by different departments, recording welfare incidents, acting on those welfare incidents, chasing up attendance, parent & carer contact, liaising with an already busy learning support section… it really adds up. My 2025 HSC class’s results were a fair bit lower than those the previous classes I’ve taken through have recorded, and it’s in part because I stopped doing extra work on weekends and went from 2-3 additional hours after getting home to half an hour. I’ve worked with people who ended up being hospitalised from stress and overwork, and I ain’t planning on letting it happen to myself.