The public education system has been unravelling for more than a decade — a class action may be the only remedy. John Frew reports.
FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, Australia has watched the slow unravelling of its public education system while pretending that nothing fundamental is wrong. Governments issue reports. Departments publish frameworks. Ministers deliver solemn assurances. Unions negotiate enterprise agreements. Yet beneath the official choreography, something far darker has been happening: the quiet destruction of the teaching profession itself.
Trevor Cobbold’s 2024 Save Our Schools analysis, perhaps the most important dataset in contemporary education, lays bare the reality. Australian teachers work the third-longest weeks in the OECD, shoulder some of the highest administrative loads of any education system on Earth, and report psychological strain at levels that would shut down any other workplace. And despite six years of promises, taskforces and “workload reviews,” conditions have not improved. Not even marginally.
Cobbold’s analysis is not merely an alarming statistical portrait. It is documentary evidence that Australia’s public teachers are working in conditions that meet every legal, psychological, and moral threshold for workplace abuse. The system is not failing by accident. It is harming by design.
- Teachers are not simply burnt out. They are traumatised.
- They are not merely stressed. They are endangered.
- They are not failing to cope. They are surviving in a system structurally incapable of keeping them safe.
Australia now faces a question no nation should ever have to ask:
Has our education system become an institutional perpetrator of harm against the very people who sustain it?
The conditions of teaching have comfortably reached the legal definition of abuse; this is evident by the following:
Physical Danger: Violence is no longer the exception
Violence in schools is no longer episodic. It is structural.
1,517 physical assaults in NSW alone in one year.
Weapons incidents have almost tripled.
Police are called to schools 53 times every day.
Over 3,000 teaching positions remain vacant, causing tens of thousands of classes to run without trained supervision.
A principal in NSW is statistically more likely to be assaulted at work than a police officer. Teachers routinely face violent outbursts from students whose trauma histories make their behaviour neurologically explosive. Yet unlike police, corrections officers, hospital staff, or even private security workers, teachers are given no training, no protective equipment, no consistent disciplinary framework, and no structural support.
SafeWork NSW defines workplace violence as “verbal abuse, threats, or physical attack.” Under that definition, thousands of Australian teachers experience workplace violence weekly, many daily.
Any private employer who exposed its staff to this level of risk would face immediate investigation, prosecution, and possible shutdown. Public schools continue without consequence.
Psychological danger: Chronic threat without agency
Modern neuroscience makes the cause of trauma unambiguous: trauma arises when an individual faces sustained threat while lacking the power to influence the outcome. Teachers now work within that exact neurological trap.
They face:
- Unpredictable student explosions
- Chronic understaffing
- Collapsing behaviour systems
- Inconsistent departmental responses
- Impossible workloads
- The removal of meaningful consequences for violent behaviour
- Public scrutiny and reputational risk for any misstep
This is the neurobiological landscape of trauma: chronic threat + zero agency.
Moral injury: The injury no one sees but everyone feels
Moral injury occurs when workers are forced to violate their values because of institutional betrayal. No modern workforce in Australia experiences moral injury at the scale teachers do.
Teachers are told:
“Keep students safe,” while being denied the authority to remove violent children.
“Build positive culture,” while being shamed and intimidated by management.
“Support every child,” while being given classes that no reasonable person could manage.
“Do not escalate behaviour,” while having no specialist to call.
“Protect the vulnerable,” while being placed in danger themselves.
Any analysis of departmental behaviour shows a psychological cruelty that is rarely acknowledged, teachers are required to carry moral responsibility for harm they have no power to prevent. This form of institutional betrayal is now one of the primary drivers of resignation from the profession.
Workload as an occupational hazard
The workload numbers Cobbold presents are not merely high, they are incompatible with safe work.
Teachers spend more time on compliance, reporting, data entry, behavioural documentation, and administrative tasks than nearly any other professional workforce in the OECD. SafeWork Australia classifies excessive workload as a primary psychosocial hazard. Yet departments have repeatedly increased administrative demands, even while staff shortages reached unprecedented levels.
This is not incompetence. It is negligence.
Unsafe systems of work: Departmental policies that cause harm
The NSW Behaviour Strategy, symbolic of national trends is perhaps the strongest evidence that departments knowingly maintain unsafe systems of work.
Key features include:
- Weakening suspension powers
- Eliminating consequences for serious behaviours
- Shifting responsibilities onto teachers without support
- Using aspirational consultant language in place of operational capacity
- Providing no trauma training
- Providing no behavioural specialists
- Insisting on “inclusive practice” without resources to make inclusion safe
This is not a behaviour system. It is a risk factory.
To understand how the system deteriorated, we must identify, not attack the individuals and structures responsible.
Ministers who perform empathy while avoiding responsibility
Jason Clare entered office as a public-school graduate who understood the system. Yet he quickly became an agent of the bureaucracy rather than its reformer. His public statements, committee structures, and reliance on consultant-led review processes have entrenched the very dynamics causing harm.
This is not about Clare’s character. It is about the role he has chosen to play: a minister who governs through process rather than moral leadership. Under his leadership:
- The Teacher Workforce Inquiry outsourced reform to consultants
- The Anti-Bullying Rapid Review adopted the same framework-driven approach that has failed for 20 years
- Annual funding promises are projected nine years into the future
- Violent classrooms remain unchanged
Ministers are responsible for safety. The system is unsafe. Therefore, ministers are failing in that duty.
Secretaries and Deputy Secretaries who protect the machine
Senior departmental executives, those who control policy, staffing formulas, behaviour frameworks, performance mechanisms, and internal culture bear measurable responsibility for the conditions that now exist.
Their influence includes:
- Rejecting principal requests for behaviour support
- Enforcing compliance-heavy cultures
- Approving harmful behaviour policies
- Silencing internal critics
- Prioritising optics over operations
- Relying on consultants instead of local expertise
These are not opinions. They are documented departmental behaviours.
Consultants: The shadow managers of education
Consultancies such as Deloitte, KPMG, PwC and others have shaped the education landscape through frameworks, behaviour strategies, “alignment kits,” and organisational reviews. Their documents are long on aspiration, short on research, and devoid of operational reality. Yet ministers and departments repeatedly rely on them instead of experienced educators.
This is not corruption. It is outsourcing of conscience.
The Unions’ failure: A neglect with consequences
Teacher unions have failed to protect teachers, not through malice, but through misdiagnosis. This has been through:
- Treating trauma as an industrial issue instead of a Safety Violation
- Unions framed violence, chronic workload, and psychological injury as bargaining points rather than WHS breaches. This mistake is historic. Industrial tools cannot prevent trauma. Only WHS law can.
- Allowing unsafe work to become normalised
- Unions participated in departmental consultations, review cycles, and steering groups while teachers were being physically assaulted, psychologically injured, and overloaded beyond capacity.
- Failing to use the strongest legal tool available
WHS legislation imposes strict obligations on employers. It is enforceable, powerful, and unambiguous. Police, nurses, paramedics, and emergency services unions use WHS aggressively. Teachers’ unions almost never have. That failure allowed abuse to persist.
The case for a national class action
A class action is now not only possible, it may be necessary; it is obvious that the legal criteria has already been met.
A national class action requires:
1. Shared harm: teachers share violence, trauma, unsafe work
2. Common cause: departmental negligence is system-wide
3. Negligent defendant: departments failed to act on known risks
4. Breach of duty: WHS duties violated daily
5. Demonstrable injury: PTSD, anxiety, medical retirements, resignations
These conditions generally occur within the system and precedents exist in comparable workforces. Class actions for psychological injury have succeeded in:
- Policing
- Defence
- Fire and rescue
- Healthcare
- Mining
Teachers face equal or greater risk with less training, less support, and fewer legal protections.
So, we ask, who would the defendants be? Carefully stated, the likely defendants would include:
- State education departments (PCBU under WHS laws)
- Senior departmental executives (for breach of duty of care)
- Possibly ministers (for systemic policy negligence)
This is not personal blame. It is structural accountability.
What would a Class Action achieve?
Potential remedies include:
- Compensation for psychological injury
- Mandatory safe staffing ratios
- Trauma-trained behaviour specialists
- Enforceable behaviour consequences
- Reduced administrative burden
- Enforceable psychological safety standards
- Compulsory WHS compliance reporting
- An end to consultant-led behaviour policy
A class action could transform Australian education more than any review, inquiry, summit, or strategy ever has.
Australia has asked teachers to carry the trauma of a generation while denying them the basic safety afforded to other frontline workers. Teachers have endured violence, intimidation, betrayal, and psychological injury while being subjected to a political and bureaucratic culture that refuses to acknowledge the harm being done.
The truth is simple: If these conditions existed in any other workplace, it would be declared unsafe. If ministers will not act, if departments cannot change, and if unions will not protect, then teachers must consider the only mechanism left to them: the law.
A class action is not a threat. It is a mirror reflecting what the system has become. It is no longer radical. It is no longer premature. It is overdue.
John Frew has worked in education for almost 50 years including as foundation principal at a secondary school for students with Conduct Disorder and Oppositional Disturbance.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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