What Early Career Teachers Are Reading

Dr Carolyn Wade and Natalie Thackwell

Most teachers form a view about school leadership within the first few years of practice, and it is rarely arrived at deliberately. It accumulates from things noticed in passing: the pace at which a principal moves between commitments, the queue outside an office, the composure required to leave a difficult conversation and walk straight into the next one. By the time anyone asks whether leadership holds any appeal, the answer has usually been settled for some time.

In a study with early career teachers in a Queensland primary school, we found these observations were being treated as evidence, and used well. Participants described the role as relentless, emotionally exposed and difficult to sustain, which is consistent with what national surveys of principal workload and wellbeing have been reporting for well over a decade. Their reading of the job was accurate.

What did not follow was the conclusion they drew from it. Having observed a role that has expanded faster than the conditions supporting it, participants concluded that leadership demanded a kind of resilience they personally lacked. The evidence was structural; the verdict was personal. Admiration made this worse rather than better, because watching someone successfully absorb sustained pressure without apparent strain suggests that the capacity to do so is a rare individual quality rather than a demand the system currently places on whoever holds the role.

The distinction matters more than it first appears. If teachers do not step forward because the conditions are unsustainable, that is something systems can be held to account for. If they do not step forward because they have concluded something about their own character, the problem disappears from view, and the people best placed to describe what is wrong with the role are the ones who have quietly ruled themselves out of ever holding it.

The question worth putting to early career teachers is therefore not whether they aspire to lead. It is what they have noticed, and whether what they have been reading is the condition of the job or a judgement about themselves. Those are different things, and only one of them is actually about them.

About the authors:

Dr Carolyn Wade is a Lecturer and Research Fellow at Griffith University, Australia. Her work explores educational leadership, parent engagement, and wellbeing through philosophical and critical lenses. Drawing on her experience in school leadership, she investigates how relational and interpretive practices can create more humane and sustainable conditions for educators. 

Natalie Thackwell is an academic at Griffith University, lecturing in educational leadership, teacher education, and professional practice. Her research focuses on sustainable leadership development and principal–teacher relational dynamics, exploring how professional relationships and systemic conditions shape leadership aspirations and career trajectories in contemporary Australian schools.