Thesis – Teacher Burnout and Retention in Regional NSW Secondary Schools

Abstract

Regional New South Wales secondary schools face persistent difficulty retaining teachers, yet the mechanisms linking working conditions to turnover in these settings remain under-examined. This study investigated burnout and retention intentions among secondary teachers in regional NSW through a sequential explanatory mixed methods design. In Phase 1, 180 teachers from 42 schools classified as Inner Regional, Outer Regional or Remote under the Australian Statistical Geography Standard completed the Maslach Burnout Inventory Educators Survey (MBI-ES) and measures of job demands and resources. In Phase 2, 12 purposively selected teachers completed semi-structured interviews. Emotional exhaustion averaged above the conventional high-burnout threshold and increased with remoteness, and 43.3% of respondents intended to leave their school within five years. Exhaustion, professional isolation and low leadership support jointly predicted intention to leave. Interviews identified workload beyond the timetable, isolation, leadership buffering and community embeddedness as the conditions shaping retention. Implications for NSW staffing policy and school leadership practice are discussed.

Introduction

Attracting and retaining teachers in non-metropolitan schools is one of the most persistent workforce problems in Australian education. The Independent Review into Regional, Rural and Remote Education concluded that staffing instability undermines curriculum breadth, continuity of learning and community confidence in country schools (Halsey, 2018). In New South Wales, secondary schools outside Greater Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong rely disproportionately on early career and out-of-field teachers, and vacancies remain harder to fill despite the incentive schemes administered under the NSW Department of Education’s (2021) Rural and Remote Education Strategy. Each departure carries costs: recruitment and induction expenditure, loss of local knowledge, and disrupted relationships with students who already experience thinner educational provision than their metropolitan peers (Downes & Roberts, 2018).

Burnout offers a plausible mechanism connecting working conditions to these departures. National workforce data show that Australian teachers routinely work well beyond their timetabled load (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership [AITSL], 2021), and large-scale surveys have found that teachers who intend to leave nominate workload and wellbeing, rather than salary, as their principal reasons (Heffernan et al., 2022). Yet Australian attrition estimates are contested and rarely disaggregated by geography (Weldon, 2018), and the burnout literature is dominated by metropolitan and international samples. Comparatively little is known about how burnout develops, and how it is resisted, under the specific conditions of regional secondary schooling.

This thesis addresses that gap. The study examined the prevalence and predictors of burnout among secondary teachers in regional NSW, and the conditions teachers themselves identify as sustaining or eroding their intention to stay. Three research questions guided the study:

1. What levels of burnout do secondary teachers in regional NSW report, and how do these vary across Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) remoteness classifications?
2. Which job demands and job resources predict burnout and intention to leave?
3. How do teachers explain the conditions that sustain or erode their commitment to remaining in regional schools?

Literature Review

Burnout in the Maslach tradition

Burnout is conceptualised as a prolonged response to chronic occupational stressors, comprising emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation (a cynical, detached stance towards students) and a diminished sense of personal accomplishment (Maslach & Leiter, 2016). The MBI-ES remains the standard instrument for teaching populations, with established scoring conventions and thresholds for each subscale (Maslach et al., 2017). Across occupational groups, exhaustion is consistently the strongest correlate of turnover intention, which positions it as the critical outcome for retention research.

The job demands-resources model

The job demands-resources (JD-R) model explains how burnout arises. Job demands such as workload, emotional labour and role conflict initiate a health-impairment process that culminates in exhaustion, while job resources such as autonomy, collegial networks and leadership support initiate a motivational process that sustains engagement; critically, resources buffer the relationship between demands and strain (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017). In teacher samples, workload and discipline demands predict exhaustion, whereas supervisory support predicts engagement and lower intention to leave (Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2018). The JD-R model suits regional research because it treats demands and resources as context-specific, inviting empirical identification of the particular pressures regional teachers face rather than assuming metropolitan equivalence.

Teaching in regional and remote Australia

Australian scholarship documents a durable staffing pattern in which incentives succeed at recruitment but fail at retention (Downes & Roberts, 2018). Regional teachers report professional and personal isolation, limited access to professional learning, out-of-field allocations, housing pressure and heightened visibility within small communities (Halsey, 2018). Policy responses in NSW have concentrated on recruitment benefits, training allowances and targeted appointments (NSW Department of Education, 2021). What is missing is research that connects validated burnout measurement with teachers’ own explanations inside a single regional design. This study contributes that connection for the NSW secondary sector.

Methodology

Research design

A sequential explanatory mixed methods design was adopted (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018). The quantitative phase established the prevalence and predictors of burnout; the qualitative phase explained the statistical patterns from participants’ perspectives. Integration occurred at two points: purposive selection of interviewees from survey respondents, and a joint display comparing regression predictors with interview themes. Figure 1 illustrates the design.

Participants

Phase 1 comprised 180 teachers from 42 government and non-government secondary schools in regional NSW. Schools were classified under the ASGS Edition 3 remoteness structure (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2023) as Inner Regional (n = 104 teachers), Outer Regional (n = 61) or Remote (n = 15). Of the sample, 64% identified as women, mean teaching experience was 9.2 years (SD = 7.4), and 31% were within their first five years of teaching. Phase 2 involved a maximum-variation subsample of 12 respondents (seven women, five men; experience 2-24 years; five Inner Regional, five Outer Regional, two Remote) spanning six key learning areas.

Instruments and analysis

Burnout was measured with the 22-item MBI-ES on its 0-6 frequency scale (Maslach et al., 2017); Cronbach’s alpha was .91 for emotional exhaustion, .78 for depersonalisation and .82 for personal accomplishment. Perceived workload, leadership support and professional isolation were measured with scales adapted from prior teacher JD-R research (Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2018), with alphas between .77 and .86, alongside self-reported weekly working hours and a five-year intention-to-leave item. Quantitative analyses comprised descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA across remoteness categories, Pearson correlations and hierarchical multiple regression. Interviews of 45-60 minutes were conducted by videoconference or telephone and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022).

Ethical considerations

The study was approved by the administering university’s Human Research Ethics Committee, and research in NSW government schools was additionally approved through the State Education Research Applications Process (SERAP). Procedures complied with the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (National Health and Medical Research Council [NHMRC], 2023). Participation was voluntary with written informed consent, pseudonyms replaced all names, and results are reported at remoteness level rather than town level because small communities are readily identifiable.

Findings

Phase 1: Survey results

Table 1 presents burnout scores by remoteness classification. The sample mean for emotional exhaustion (30.1) exceeded the conventional high-burnout threshold of 27, with 110 respondents (61.1%) scoring above it. Exhaustion differed significantly across remoteness categories, F(2, 177) = 4.01, p = .020, following a clear gradient from Inner Regional to Remote schools. Depersonalisation showed the same direction without reaching significance, F(2, 177) = 2.84, p = .061, and personal accomplishment did not differ, F(2, 177) = 1.51, p = .224. Respondents reported working a mean of 55.4 hours per week (SD = 7.1), consistent with national workforce data (AITSL, 2021). Overall, 78 teachers (43.3%) intended to leave their current school within five years, rising to 60.0% in Remote schools.

Table 1: MBI-ES subscale scores and intention to leave by ASGS remoteness classification (N = 180)

Note. Emotional exhaustion is scored 0-54, depersonalisation 0-30 and personal accomplishment 0-48 (Maslach et al., 2017); higher personal accomplishment indicates lower burnout.

Exhaustion correlated with weekly hours (r = .44, p < .001), and intention to leave correlated with exhaustion (r = .52, p < .001) and negatively with leadership support (r = -.45, p < .001). In hierarchical regression, gender and experience explained 5% of variance in intention to leave; adding the burnout and JD-R variables raised the model to R² = .38, F(6, 173) = 17.7, p < .001. Emotional exhaustion (β = .41, p < .001), leadership support (β = -.28, p < .001) and professional isolation (β = .19, p = .006) were significant predictors, while weekly hours were not once exhaustion was included (β = .09, p = .19), suggesting the effect of hours operates through exhaustion.

Phase 2: Interview themes

Reflexive thematic analysis produced four themes, summarised in Table 2. Workload beyond the timetable was universal: participants described planning across multiple stages, marking, compliance documentation and co-curricular rosters that, in small staffrooms, cycle through the same few names. As one participant put it, “the teaching is the easy part; it is everything after 3.30 that buries you” (Participant 4, Inner Regional). Isolation was framed both professionally and geographically; one interviewee described being “the only physics teacher within an hour’s drive” (Participant 9, Outer Regional) and several noted six-hour round trips for a single day of professional learning. Where principals protected planning time, acknowledged effort and brokered flexibility, teachers described identical demands as manageable, which is consistent with a buffering resource. Finally, community embeddedness anchored retention: “this town turns up for you, and that is what keeps me” (Participant 11, Remote).

Table 2: Themes from reflexive thematic analysis of teacher interviews (n = 12)

Discussion

The findings answer the first research question directly: burnout among regional NSW secondary teachers is substantial, and emotional exhaustion is patterned by geography. The exhaustion gradient across ASGS categories mirrors the health-impairment pathway of the JD-R model (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017), with chronic workload acting as the primary demand. That workload, rather than hours alone, predicted intention to leave through exhaustion aligns with national evidence that wellbeing, not salary, drives Australian teachers’ departure intentions (Heffernan et al., 2022).

Professional isolation emerged as the distinctly regional demand. It operates simultaneously as a demand, because sole subject teachers absorb all planning and marking in their discipline, and as a resource deficit, because thin networks remove the collegial support that metropolitan teachers take for granted. This dual character helps explain why exhaustion rises with remoteness even when timetabled loads are comparable, and it extends prior teacher JD-R findings (Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2018) by identifying isolation as a predictor in its own right, consistent with two decades of Australian rural staffing research (Downes & Roberts, 2018).

Leadership support was the strongest modifiable resource. Its independent negative association with intention to leave, together with the interview evidence that supportive principals render identical demands manageable, is a direct illustration of the JD-R buffering hypothesis. Community embeddedness, by contrast, functioned as a motivational anchor that incentive policy does not create: teachers stayed for relationships and visible student impact, not allowances, echoing the conclusion that incentives recruit but conditions retain (Halsey, 2018; NSW Department of Education, 2021).

Four limitations qualify these conclusions. The design is cross-sectional, so reciprocal effects between exhaustion and turnover intention cannot be ruled out. All measures are self-reported, raising common-method concerns. The Remote subsample (n = 15) limits statistical power for the highest-need schools. Finally, intention to leave is an imperfect proxy for actual attrition, which remains difficult to measure in Australia (Weldon, 2018).

Implications and Conclusion

Three sets of implications follow:

• System level: staffing formulas and workload audits should recognise the compounding effect of small staffrooms, and funded subject networks should connect sole subject teachers across regional NSW; incentive design should reward retention, not only recruitment.
• School level: leadership development for regional principals should treat recognition, workload brokerage and protected planning time as retention infrastructure, supported by structured mentoring for early career teachers.
• Research: longitudinal designs linking burnout trajectories to actual attrition, with larger Remote samples, would strengthen causal claims.

In sum, burnout in regional NSW secondary schools is real, measurable and geographically patterned. Workload drives exhaustion, isolation compounds it, and leadership support and community embeddedness offset it. Framed through the JD-R model, retention is a design problem for the system rather than a resilience problem for individuals: the schools that keep their teachers are those in which demands are contained and resources are deliberately built. If NSW is to staff its regional schools sustainably, policy attention must shift from recruiting teachers to the conditions under which they can afford, professionally and personally, to stay.

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