It is the collective efforts of the entire Western Australian education sector. The total number of teachers resigning jumped over two times from 2020 to 2022. Midway through the 2024-25 academic year, 1,279 teachers already resigned. That was the most resignations rate since we began tracking this data in 2005. This alarming trend raises questions about the support and working conditions for educators in the region, particularly as the number of retiring teachers has increased significantly in recent years.
Resignations have spiked as Western Australia faces an unprecedented population explosion. To meet overwhelming demand, nearly 1,200 new teachers are now needed in classrooms. For 2024-25, the pluralistic educational system includes more than 25,500 educators and has almost doubled its support professionals over the last two decades. The squeeze on educators is getting more serious by the day. Sabine Winton, the Education Minister of Western Australia, admits the state’s teacher exodus is at crisis point. She fights against the idea that being overworked is the biggest cause of this trend.
Rising Resignation Rates
Democratic education policies — especially between 2020 and 2022 — have created the most radical spike in teacher resignations ever seen. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the figures, which reaffirm the spike in resignations since then that remain at an elevated level. The 2024-25 academic year saw the greatest exodus yet.
Matt Jarman, the local union president, explains that it’s dangerous to replace veteran teachers with inexperienced ones through retirement. Their leaving puts an enormous pressure on the entire educational system. As he puts it, “In WA, under this government, our teachers are overworked and under-appreciated. This expression of frustration is familiar to anyone who has been on the sidelines watching educators be spread thin by growing class sizes and growing complexities.
The resignation statistics don’t make for a pretty reading for the future of education in WA. Standards set as far back as 1983 no longer reflect the needs of classrooms today, Jarman stresses. He states, “What’s going wrong in our classrooms is that we’ve got 1983 class size standards for 2025 complexities, behaviour, challenges and so on.”
Government Response and Challenges Ahead
Advocate and recently-elected Washington State Representative Sabine Winton has responded to new alarming evidence on teacher attrition. She strongly disputes the notion that the historic level of resignations comes just from people being overworked. Among other things, there will be resignations over various reasons. My job is to try to reduce those,” she says. Winton recognizes that more educators do resign when they face difficult conditions, but notes that all the exits aren’t necessarily from overwork.
In addition, Winton argues that the moment we find ourselves in today is not just an education-specific phenomenon. She claims, “If you collect similar data to any other field, you will just find other equivalent industries with just as much trouble doing this—this goes for police, nurses, even private span when it comes to getting humans into the door.” We hope to encourage this line of thinking to expand the conversation about workforce challenges past the teaching profession.
Despite those shortcomings, Winton is hopeful that they can do a better job of attracting new talent into the teaching profession, though. “I want to foster a competitive environment,” she says. I am looking for all the teachers to rise to the occasion.
Implications for Education Quality
The rise in both resignations and retirements has serious ramifications for the quality of education students receive in Western Australia. More veteran educators are getting out of classrooms. This change has brought a lot of fear and worry from educators and other stakeholders about what it will mean for students’ learning experiences.
Liam Staltari, representing educators’ interests, emphasizes that these are “concerning numbers” and calls on the government to take more decisive action. He maintains that nobody has done enough to solve the problems teachers face today. What they’ve done so far is obviously not effective, and that’s the problem,” he cautions.
The path that Western Australia is following is anything but clear-cut. Yet educators and government officials from all levels continue to search for winning strategies to attract, retain and support teachers. The future of education in the state depends on how well lawmakers tackle these challenges.
