How do we attract and keep teachers? It starts with respect

A research professor in the School of Education in the Faculty of Creative Industries, Education & Social Justice, Professor Mills says the answer lies in treating the teaching profession with greater respect as well as providing new teachers with better support including mentors.

“If you ask teachers what they need to stay in the job, while important, more money is rarely the first answer. They want the freedom and time to be able to teach, and to have their voices heard by the education system,” Professor Mills said.

“What they don’t need is to be hyper focussed on standardised tests. And they don’t want to feel like they are part of a sausage factory.

“To get more teachers, we've got to respect the profession and say, this is a job that is the equivalent of any other profession and looked up to as much as an engineer, a lawyer or a doctor.

“It doesn’t help that educational policy is constantly mandating what we should be teaching instead of just letting people exercise their own professional judgments.

“It’s become a bureaucratic nightmare for teachers. They are drowning in paperwork and meaningless reforms that create change fatigue or constantly chasing their tails in time-wasting exercises.

“This is where policy makers can make a difference. If they can improve the state and status of the profession, there will be a trickle-down effect with a positive impact on students.”

Professor Mills is also an honorary professor at the University of Queensland, where he worked for 23 years and was Head of School (Education) before taking up the position of the inaugural Director of the Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research at the Institute of Education, University College London (where he now holds an Emeritus Professor position).

He returned to Brisbane and joined QUT during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and has continued his work in the fields of social justice in education, teachers' work and identities, alternative education, school retention and second chance schooling, gender and education, school reform, teaching boys, and community solutions for schooling engagement.

One of his most recent projects was the research paper Love, care, and solidarity: understanding the emotional and affective labour of school leadership, examining the experiences of principals in England and Australia, co-authored with Dr Amanda McKay from Griffith University and published in 2023 in the Cambridge Journal of Education.

A former President of the Australian Association for Research in Education, he has published more than 100 journal articles in his career and co-authored 10 books.

“I love being back in Brisbane and I really love QUT. I have got some great colleagues in the School of Education and our research is satisfyingly broad,” he said.

“One of our current projects is examining what we're calling career-change teachers.

“These, often, older teachers bring a wealth of life experience but find that a double-edged sword because they might be 40 but they are still a first-year teacher and not everyone realises that within a school and the expectations on them can be too high.

“We know the danger point for people leaving the profession is the five-year mark so let’s look at how we can support beginning teachers and keep them there. That could involve giving them a lighter timetable to begin with, as well as a mentor.

“If one person in a village has a problem, then it can be seen as their problem but if 100 people in the village have the same problem, it's a village problem. Likewise, what’s going on in teaching is a system problem.”

Professor Mills’ passion for social justice was inherited from his mother Ros who emigrated to Australia with him as ‘ten-pound Poms’.

They ended up in Brisbane and while he was the first in his family to attend university, completing an economics degree at the University of Queensland, his mother quickly followed into higher education studies, encouraged by her son and new educational opportunities brought in by the Whitlam government in the 1970s.

“Mum ended up doing her PhD on women who kill and how they are treated in the public sphere, analysing the discourses around Brisbane’s notorious ‘Vampire Killers’,” Professor Mills said.

“She was very involved in feminist politics, working at a domestic violence resource centre, Women's House, at West End. She was also an activist and arrested several times at marches and protests, even serving time in Boggo Road Gaol.

“So, I was exposed to all sorts of interesting debates the women’s movement was having at that time, including about what constitutes a man and raising boys.”

Following his first stint at university, Professor Mills spent several years travelling, competing in running events around the world. He had represented Queensland in marathons and in 1982, ran in the second London marathon.

“That was exciting and a few years later, when I reconnected with my father who we lost touch with on the move to Australia, I found out he had run in the first ever London Marathon.”

On Professor Mills’ return to Brisbane, he followed in his mother’s footsteps by becoming an activist, joining protests against the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government and getting involved in peace movements.

He embarked on an anti-nuclear bicycle ride from Adelaide to Alice Springs and ended up staying there for two years working with a peace group, beginning an education degree remotely with Charles Sturt University before moving back to Brisbane.

“I had planned to teach economics and modern history, but my first permanent position was at Indooroopilly State High School and I was given English and ancient history,” he said.

“I was especially interested in the sociology of education so I started doing more subjects at university while I was teaching and did my honours degree with a focus on social justice groups at the school I was involved with.

“For context, this was 1990 and Queensland had just gone through the Fitzgerald inquiry. The Goss Labour government came in and set up a social justice strategy for education, which was right up my alley.”

Professor Mills taught at Indooroopilly for four years and then spent a year at Ferny Grove State High School before the lure of academia took him on a new path.

“I was offered a PhD scholarship at the University of Queensland, took leave from the Department of Education and never went back.

His PhD was on gender and violence and education, around the construction of masculinities. It led to his first book - Challenging Violence in Schools: An issue of masculinities (Open University Press, 2001), which remains widely circulated and influential.

One of Professor Mills’ current research projects is an Australian Research Council-funded study of teachers in alternative schools with young people who are often homeless or caught up in the youth justice system.

“These are kids no other school wants and yet these teachers say they love the experience,” he said.

“What is it about these places that make teachers want to work there and enjoy their work? It’s the freedom they have. They've still got to work with the Australian Curriculum but there's much more flexibility and no one breathing down their neck.

“A lot of teachers we've interviewed, who have left the mainstream, tell us this is why they wanted to become a teacher, to feel they are making a difference to young people's lives.”

Professor Mills says it is a positive that the teaching crisis is now recognised as a first step towards improving conditions for new and established teachers.

“Previously, teachers were an easy target, especially for the media,” he said.

“I think the part of that problem is telling teachers what they must do in the classroom. This is sometimes seen as a way to support teachers; providing them with curriculum resources like lesson plans so they don't have to develop them.

“However, what teachers really want is the time to be able to do that themselves, because it becomes something quite personal.

“They have to think about their students and how to match the curriculum to them and deliver it in a way which engages them."