Teachers matter: So how we lead them matters too
‘Every time we speak about teachers with respect, invest in their expertise, hold high expectations, protect their time for the things that matter most, celebrate their impact, listen to their professional voice and support them to grow, we tell a different story about teaching.’ In her latest Teacher column, Rachael Lehr explores what it means to truly value teachers, and why how we lead them matters just as much.
Nearly 10 years ago, I wrote an article for the Australian Council for Educational Leaders (ACEL) titled Teachers Matter: Let’s Alter the Narrative in my role as an ACEL New Voice Scholar 2017. This was long before my role as Western Australia Branch Executive, and now WA Branch President.
In the article, I shared the story about the 7-year-old me who wanted nothing more than to become a teacher and outlined the rocky journey to attain this dream. I, perhaps naively at the time, wanted a world in which no child or young adult would be told they are ‘too smart’ to teach, and that anyone who entered the profession would never be viewed as ‘just’ a teacher.
I still want that, but I understand something now that I don’t think I could see as clearly back then. Attracting great people into teaching is only the beginning of the story, and that alone it is not enough to shift the narrative as I proposed. To do that, we have to create places in which great teachers can become even better, can sustain meaningful careers, and can continue to (or even start to) believe that the work they do matters.
At the time, in my role as a specialist teacher in science and digital technologies, my emphasis was on the importance of teachers and how often teachers were undervalued in broader society – something I felt passionate about. I focused on the status of the profession and the way that, by discouraging talented people from becoming teachers, we were diminishing teaching as a profession.
Back then, I shared that capable students were expected to pursue something ‘more challenging’ than teaching, and I put a call out for a shift from the message that ‘those who can’t do, teach’ into ‘those who can do, teach’. Nearly a decade after I first wrote about the need to alter the narrative around teaching, the issue has not disappeared.
The OECD's Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2024 found that only one-third of surveyed Australian teachers agreed that teachers are valued in society, a decline of 11 percentage points since 2018 (Friedman et al., 2025).
I still wholeheartedly believe that ‘teachers matter’ and we should value them more, but with more experience in education and my shifting roles over the years, I now see it as a more nuanced conversation in that teachers definitely do matter, therefore the way we talk about, develop, trust, challenge and lead teachers matters a lot too.
In today’s educational climate, I feel that the narrative has shifted from simply ‘teachers aren’t respected as much as they should be’, as I proposed many years ago, to being a more complicated challenge where we are simultaneously experiencing a teacher workforce shortage and very public conversations about teacher quality, explicit teaching, evidence-informed practice, student behaviour, NAPLAN results, initial teacher education and accountability.
Australia’s National Teacher Workforce Action Plan (Australian Government Department of Education, 2025) explicitly includes both Keeping the teachers we have and Elevating the profession as national priorities, indicating that we have shifted from the earlier narrative of others more broadly in society not seeing how important the work teachers do is, to teachers and educators themselves not feeling supported or trusted to do the important work they do and thus looking to leave their teaching roles.
On this, the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership's June 2026 national workforce report identifies workload, work–life balance and work-related stress as the 3 main reasons teachers give for intending to leave the profession. It also reports growing concern around parent behaviour, student behaviour and class sizes. In WA specifically – the context in which I teach, lead and learn – the State School Teachers’ Union of WA's 2025 member survey similarly found workload, burnout and perceived lack of respect mentioned prominently among respondents as reasons why they had contemplated leaving the teaching profession.
While I don’t propose to have the answers to the dilemma, I do wonder if, perhaps, in light of these new complexities and challenges for teachers, instead of an enhanced call for respecting and valuing teachers more, the more important question may be: what does valuing teachers actually look like?
While I am no longer a teacher by title, I will always be a teacher by heart, and I hope I speak for the collective in saying that telling teachers that they are ‘amazing’, that the work they do matters and changes lives, is just not enough if we continue to overload them and defend teachers working incredibly hard as if that’s ‘just the role’ and the ‘nature of teaching’.
Also, I don’t think it is about lowering expectations and removing roles from their plates that they enjoy (like planning innovative and exciting lessons) in an attempt to make the job easier, while still expecting teachers to undertake a plethora of tasks that can only be defined as ‘administrivia’.
I don’t believe that valuing our teachers is about making the job easier, lowering expectations, and shielding our profession from challenges, it’s quite the opposite in fact. If teaching matters as much as we say it does, then valuing teachers would look like upholding high expectations and empowering teachers by ensuring access to the strongest evidence, high-quality professional learning, thoughtful feedback, and leaders who support them in improving.
While I argued in my original article for attracting highly capable people to the profession, I would add that, once we attract them, we have a responsibility to keep developing and uplifting teachers. The earlier question I raised: How do we convince talented people to become teachers? shifts to How do we create a profession talented people want to enter, develop within and remain in?
Back then, I put a call out to ‘raise the standards and alter the narrative’ and this is something I stand by even now. However, rather than just espousing that ‘teachers are heroes’, I think the added tension now is to acknowledge that high regard for teachers and high expectations are not dichotomous. We can believe teachers are extraordinarily important (even superheroes!) while also believing that teachers should continually reflect on and improve their teaching, ‘not because they are not good enough but because they can be even better’ (Wiliam, 2014, p. 16).
We can value teachers by championing evidence-informed practices without removing teacher agency and reducing teachers to technicians following scripts. We can value teachers by expecting consistency to whole-school structures, routines and processes, without demanding conformity, uniformity or absence of personality. We can value teachers by holding them accountable to the vision, values and the ‘why’ of our contexts and still trust their professionalism. We can also value teachers by talking about improving teaching without upholding teachers themselves as ‘the problem’ every time student outcomes disappoint us.
Recent national debate around student achievement in NAPLAN continues to connect system improvement with evidence-based and explicit teaching approaches. As both a school leader and researcher, I feel that the message is more nuanced than being either ‘leave teachers alone to teach how they want to teach’ or ‘teachers need to lift their game and teach better’. I don’t believe that improving teaching and valuing teachers are competing agendas; they are intertwined.
Back in 2017, I was questioning ‘How does society see teachers?’ but now I also want to ask: What story are leaders telling teachers about themselves?
I ended the previous article by saying ‘changing the narrative starts with us’, and, at that point, the ‘us’ I was speaking about was teaching as a profession. I still believe that, but I would add something new in highlighting the responsibility of leaders to assist to alter the narrative for individual teachers, and the teaching profession as a whole.
Leaders alter the narrative every day. We change the story a little every time we trust someone with meaningful responsibility, as instead of being perceived as burying them in more workload, it can tell them: I believe you are capable. When we invest time into targeted and meaningful professional learning, we shift the narrative marginally as we tell teachers: Your expertise matters. When we give useful constructive feedback instead of avoiding difficult conversations, we send teachers the message: You are able to become even better. When we remove unnecessary work and ‘administrivia’, the narrative shared to teachers is: Your time is valuable. When we protect teachers from unreasonable criticism, but don’t protect poor practice from scrutiny, we tell them: This profession matters too much for either contempt or complacency. And finally, when we notice excellent teaching, celebrate it, and make it visible, we work to alter the narrative about what teachers are capable of and how important that work is.
That said, narratives aren't shifted by simply talking about them, as they are changed by what we repeatedly do. Every time we speak about teachers with respect, invest in their expertise, hold high expectations, protect their time for the things that matter most, celebrate their impact, listen to their professional voice and support them to grow, we tell a different story about teaching.
Teachers matter. So how we lead them matters too.
References
Australian Government Department of Education. (2025). National Teacher Workforce Action Plan: 2025 update.
Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (2026). ATWD National Trends: Teacher Workforce (June 2026 ed., 2020-2024).
https://www.aitsl.edu.au/resources/national-trends-teacher-workforce-june-2026
Friedman, T., Ainley, J., Schulz, W., & Dix, K. (2025). TALIS 2024 Australian Report: The Teaching and Learning International Survey. Australian Council for Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.37517/978-1-74286-801-1
State School Teachers’ Union of Western Australia. (2025). Teacher departures influenced by workload and lack of respect. Western Teacher, 54(4). https://www.sstuwa.org.au/WesternTeacher/2025/volume-544-july-2025/teacher-departures-influenced-workload-and-lack-respect
Wiliam, D. (2014). The formative evaluation of teaching performance. Centre for Strategic Education, Occasional Paper No. 137.
