Written by Andrew Murray, Lumina Consulting.
This Thursday I’ll be speaking at the National Education Summit in Melbourne, and one question has been following me as I prepare:
When did exhaustion become evidence that we care?
I ask that as someone who has spent more than thirty years in education, including many years in school leadership and principalship. I know the rhythms of school life well. The quiet hour before anyone else arrives. The day that begins with a carefully written list and has completely rearranged itself by 9.15am. The conversation in the corridor that turns out to be far more important than whatever was in the diary.
And I know the late-night email.
I sent plenty of them.
At the time, I thought I was being efficient. I was clearing the inbox, getting ahead of tomorrow and making sure things were dealt with. I never thought I was asking anyone else to work the same hours.
Looking back, I am less certain about the message I was sending.
Schools are full of people who care deeply about what they do. It remains one of the things I love most about education. Teachers notice when a student is unusually quiet. Leaders remember when a colleague has something difficult happening at home. People stay behind because a young person needs five more minutes.
That generosity is one of our great strengths.
It can also make it difficult to know when enough is enough.
The Australian evidence gives us good reason to pay attention. The 2024 Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey found that school leaders worked an average of 54.5 hours each week during term time. Almost four in five worked more than 50 hours, and more than a third worked 61 hours or more. The sheer quantity of work remained one of the major sources of stress.
That is difficult to explain simply as poor time management or a failure to set personal boundaries.
When long hours become normal across a profession, we have to look at the job as well as the person doing it.
I have nothing against 5am. Sometimes that early hour is the best part of the day. What concerns me is when 5am becomes the only way to keep up.
A principal may send an email before sunrise because it is the first uninterrupted moment they have had. The teacher receiving it may experience something quite different: perhaps this is what committed people are expected to do around here.
No instruction has been given. No policy has changed. Yet a workplace norm can still be forming.
I can see this more clearly now than I did when I was leading schools. Culture is often created in the gap between what we intend and what other people experience.
That places a responsibility on leaders, but we should not pretend the answer is simply to tell principals to put their phones away.
Sometimes there is simply too much work.
School leaders are dealing with staffing pressures, increasingly complex student needs, community expectations, compliance requirements and multiple system priorities. Turning the phone off at six o’clock does not make the unfinished tasks disappear.
So if I had to identify one lever that deserves far more attention in our conversations about educator wellbeing, it would be workload design.
Every time we add something, we should be willing to ask what can come away.
I think back to meetings I attended, and probably meetings I called, because that was simply what we did on a Tuesday afternoon. Reports continued because they had always existed. Capable people accumulated responsibilities because everyone knew they would get them done. New initiatives arrived while the old ones quietly remained.
None of these decisions looks particularly damaging on its own. Together, however, they shape how a school feels to work in.
That is where leaders still have genuine room to act.
We can look closely at whether every meeting earns the time it consumes. We can become clearer about the few priorities that really deserve attention. We can protect periods in which people can think without interruption. We can give staff greater discretion about how they achieve agreed goals, and we can resist the temptation to reward our most dependable people by continually giving them more to carry.
This is not glamorous wellbeing work. There is no new programme to launch.
It is simply the discipline of making the work more workable.
Of course, schools cannot solve everything themselves. Systems have responsibilities too. If new requirements are introduced, there should be serious discussion about what can be stopped. If we say instructional leadership matters, leaders need enough protected time to undertake it. Sustainable leadership cannot depend indefinitely on good people finding another hour somewhere.
This is why I keep returning to flourishing.
For me, flourishing asks a different question from coping. Coping is concerned with whether we can continue functioning under pressure. A flourishing lens asks whether the way we organise our work allows people to remain purposeful, connected and effective over time, with enough of themselves left for the relationships and lives that exist beyond the school gate.
That does not mean education should become easy.
Some weeks will be hard. There will be crises, difficult conversations and times when people need to give more than usual. That comes with work worth doing.
The problem begins when the exceptional week quietly becomes the normal one.
So rather than launching another wellbeing initiative, I would start somewhere much simpler.
On Monday morning, sit with your leadership team and ask:
What are we asking people to carry that no longer needs to be carried?
Then listen carefully to the answer.
Perhaps it is a meeting. A report. A process that made sense five years ago. An expectation of immediate availability. Something small that has become normal simply because nobody has stopped to question it.
I still believe education is extraordinary work, and I still believe it is worth giving ourselves to. I am simply less convinced that commitment should be measured by how much of ourselves the job consumes.
That is one of the conversations I want to continue at the National Education Summit in Melbourne this Thursday.
And perhaps, before we ask educators to become better at carrying the load, we should become much better at deciding what they need to carry in the first place.