Listeners on 6PR Mornings have reacted passionately to radical reform planned for our education system, designed to improve teaching standards and pay.

The federal government’s Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership’s blueprint for fixing the teacher shortage is by recruiting university-educated workers to earn while they learn on the job to teach school students.

The plan includes a short “paid internship’’ for career-changers to earn cash while upgrading their credentials with a two-year masters degree in education.

Nathan told host Liam Bartlett he and his brother were both teachers up until last year.

“The workload has just gotten out of hand, and that idea from AITSL, you could be the smartest bloke in the room, it doesn’t make you a good teacher,” he said.

“I was teaching for eight years and in those eight years the change has been dramatic, paperwork comes first and the amount of admin you do now just takes away from the experience in the classroom, which isn’t fair on the kids, because of how much we’re expected to do.”

Another listener, Jennifer, told Bartlett she was a retired teacher of 40 years in the classroom and would happily go back to work but she loses too much of her pension and the paperwork required today was “ridiculous”.

“What’s the job of a teacher Liam, is it paperwork? No, it’s to nurture and guide a child through the most wonderful learning experiences that they can have,” she said.

“But I found as when I went on … but it was ‘oh no, we have to do NAPLAN, we have to follow the UK models, the US models’… I mean get a grip, why don’t we follow Sweden.”

LISTEN 👇 to former teachers explain the pressure on them today