A new international report has revealed what teachers already know: pressure on them is growing all the time. More and more, they’re expected to be counsellors to their students, dealing with issues that once would have been left up to parents.
“We are picking up a lot of the slack of what I would call under-parenting,” the president of the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council, Chris Presland, tells the Sydney Morning Herald.
“Parents who are under pressure are turning to schools on [things like] the issue of cyber-usage by students. Obesity is another issue.”
LISTEN: Dear parents, this is everything teachers want you to know.
A teacher who recently quit the profession, after working for several years in inner-western Sydney primary schools, tells Mamamia that teachers are “definitely” being relied on to do more and more that’s outside of their job description.
“It can feel like I’m a second parent to these kids, particularly when they’re in primary school,” she adds.
The teacher says the last school she was at tried very hard to foster healthy food choices.
“Poor food habits are hard to deal with, because if you have a child who refuses to eat what their parents have packed them, they can go hungry all day, which of course isn’t healthy, but also impacts their ability to learn because they aren’t able to focus,” she explains.
