As my working year has come to an end, I decided to make a blog post discussing the year I have had teaching in Australia. I thought it could be interesting to share my experiences for people who have wanted more details on what I have been up to, or perhaps others in a similar position to me looking to make the leap to teach somewhere new.

Finding Teaching Work in Queensland

When I left Canada in July last year, I was coming off a very tiring school year in Canada teaching Grade 7, with five years of experience in total. On our arrival in Australia, I truthfully did not know how much I wanted to teach while living here. While I had applied for my teaching certification for Queensland while in Canada, I wanted to see what it was like on the ground before making a decision.

After arriving in Australia, I had a couple of weeks to wait until my teaching registration went through. While waiting, I applied for several other jobs as a fallback, and didn’t hear from very many. By the time the Queensland College of Teachers had approved my application to teach, I was ready for any work at all, given the job landscape for Working Holiday Makers in Australia. This whole year, I have been hearing and reading about so many people on Working Holiday Visas (WHVs) that have been struggling to find work, so I felt lucky that I had some very employable skills and certifications to fall back on. Australia, like most of the world, is absolutely desperate for teachers in most areas at the moment.

Depending on the state you live in Australia, there are different protocols for how you can find work as a teacher once registered. Some states use recruitment agencies, while others use online systems and apps. There are also so many types of schools: state (public) schools, Catholic schools, and private schools are the main categories. As I was mainly interested in relief (substitute) teaching, I applied to the Department of Education in Queensland to work for state schools, and my profile was set up with the dispatch system called TRACER.

The TRACER system is basically a call centre where employees call you each morning to assign you with relief work. Based on my experiential research as well as Facebook group posts, I figured out that you get called first if your address is the closest location to the school. You can also find work in Queensland by contacting private schools directly or using an app called Class Cover for Catholic schools, which I signed up for but didn’t end up using very much.

As luck would have it, I lived less than 1 kilometre from a school in a Brisbane suburb, so I got a call on my first day and ended up teaching there for the majority of our time living in Brisbane. The big difference between my experiences in relief teaching in Canada and Australia is that schools are allowed to call or text you directly if they want you to work for them. Since I had a smooth first day, and the same teacher was away the following day, I ended up getting booked for work most days of the week each week. I was also offered a contract early on, but did not take it as I was wanting to avoid the extra responsibilities of taking on a classroom. By the end of my time in Brisbane, I had worked mostly at state schools but also taught a day in the Catholic school system and a day in the private system.

I was a bit nervous about our move to the Gold Coast as I had read on Facebook that there was less of a relief teacher shortage in the area. I strategically opened up the subjects that I was willing to teach on TRACER (such as PE), and had to work to sell myself a little bit to schools that perhaps wanted to book me in through text or call. I did this by dropping off my resume at several schools, which felt strange. Some schools were receptive to my greetings and texted me over the next couple of months to book me in to work, while others I never heard from.

As luck would have it, I was booked in for P.E. teaching at elementary schools for my first few days of work on the Gold Coast. After a week or so, I was offered a contract teaching P.E. for the rest of the school year, and since it seemed like a good setup, I took it! At that point, I had been to enough schools and been worried about getting work consistently that I figured having something stable would be better than not knowing what I would be doing each day.

Finding Teaching Work in Western Australia

It was easy to get my certification in WA as the states have an agreement called “mutual recognition,” where Australian teaching registrations are recognized for application to other states. The job hunt in WA was similar to Queensland, in that you needed to contact schools yourself to see if they were looking for teachers to work. The department also has an online system called Casual Staff Seeker, and schools used apps like Schrole and Class Cover as well, which basically post jobs and the first person to respond gets the job, but it was not one uniform system throughout WA like it was in Queensland.

I got called for my first job before I even got to Perth after sending my resume to a high school that was recruiting relief teachers in a Facebook group. I ended up agreeing to teach there in a contract for a term, where I had a 60% course load of classes, and then did relief work to earn a full-time wage. After my contract finished, I stayed on at the school as a full-time relief teacher for the rest of my time in Perth.

Main Differences Between Schools in Canada and Australia

I thought that I would make a list of the main differences I noticed between schools in Canada and Australia, for those that are interested:

• School building layout: In Australia, as the weather is typically quite nice throughout the year, schools are a collection of small buildings rather than one big building like they are in Canada. This meant that there were no school hallways to walk through, and a lot of activities by default were done outside, including P.E. class and students eating lunch. This was quite different from my experience in Canada, where schools are typically one big building with designated areas for PE (the gym) and lunch (cafeteria or classrooms).
• Uniforms: Across Australia, all students wear a uniform, which typically consists of shorts and a polo shirt. In Queensland, there is a law that students need to wear a bucket hat covering their face when outside, and this also applies to teachers who are on recess and lunch supervision duty. In Western Australia, the rules were a bit less strict, though I only worked at a high school so I am not sure the extent of these rules in elementary school. Students were shocked and jealous when I explained to them that most students in Canada don’t have to wear uniforms!
• Lingo: Many school-based words were quite different in Australia compared to Canada. I will never forget my first day of teaching in Australia, when at the start of the day a student asked me to use a “bubbler” (water fountain). I later found out this term was only used in eastern Australia, as students in WA had no idea what I was talking about when I talked about a bubbler with them. Other fun words include:
  • Rubber – eraser
  • Canteen – cafeteria/snack bar
  • Form – homeroom
  • Drink bottle – water bottle
  • Can I go to the toilet/get a drink – can I go to the bathroom/drink water
  • Maths – math
  • Wag – skip school
  • HASS – social studies (stands for humanities and social sciences)
  • LOTE – language other than english (we would just take french)
  • DOTT – prep/non-instructional time (stands for duties other than teaching)
  • Scissors paper rock – rock paper scissors
  • Dots and crosses – Tic tac toe
  • Heads down thumbs up – heads up 7 up
• Curriculum: The curriculum in Australia was very much what I remember school being like when I was a kid, with a big focus on literacy and numeracy programs in a highly structured format. I could see the benefits of this as I observed that students were largely very proficient in reading and generally proficient in math. This is different from our new curriculum in Canada, which is much more open (and more fun to teach), but one of the consequences showing up is that students are weaker in literacy and numeracy due to the lack of focus and mandated, structured instruction of these specific skills.
• Classroom visitors: I had a few instances of large bugs entering a classroom while teaching this year, including 2 cockroaches and 1 giant spider. As you can imagine, the students panicked, so I was left to diffuse the situation each time. Let’s just say it was a good thing I wore my Blundstone boots on those days.
• Air conditioning and fans: Due to the generally warm weather in Australia, overhead fans were a regularity in classrooms and were often on. This had an unfortunate annoyance of blowing school papers everywhere, and you couldn’t leave anything unattended without it blowing away.

Benefits of Teaching Abroad

While scary at times, especially in the beginning or when I was launching into a new teaching situation, this was the best professional development that I could have done in my career. I ended my last school year in Canada feeling exhausted, defeated, and questioning whether I wanted to stay in the profession. Shaking things up for a year helped me appreciate the parts of teaching that I liked, and reminded me that so many aspects of the job are dynamic and benefit from a change of scenery. I left this year loving teaching again!

By mostly engaging in substitute teaching for the year, I got to explore so many different classrooms and interact with so many students. Even though I was in a different country, the differences in student behaviour were minimal – I blame the globalization associated with the Internet. However, it was still so refreshing to jump back into new classrooms for just a day or short amount of time, and have a break from the systemic pressures associated with contract teaching such as emails, assessments, and long-term behaviour management. Another added bonus was that with 5 years of experience already under my belt, I found the work generally quite easy as I had so many strategies to help myself and students to be successful.

Closing Remarks

Overall, teaching in Australia was a fantastic experience. I learned a lot about myself and discovered ways to become a better teacher while connecting with hundreds of students, as well as many teachers, in a new teaching environment, culture, and climate. If you are thinking about teaching abroad, I highly recommend it. It will definitely push you out of your comfort zone, but you will be better for it. It may even lead you in a new direction in your career, which I think is what has happened for me.

As always, thank you for reading!