Is a four-day work week the solution to Victoria's teaching shortage?
Victorian teachers spend about 55 percent of their 38-hour work week in front of students.
Matthew Sims
March 05, 2026
In a bid to attract new teachers and retain current staff, the Australian Education Union’s Victorian branch has proposed trialling a four-day work week for state school teachers.
However, a local teacher in Melbourne’s south-east says the move could worsen the stress placed on educators.
What happened: Last month, the AEU Victorian branch called for a trial of a four-day work week to look at the viability of having teachers work remotely for one day per week.
🗓️ Shifting schedules: Currently, students are in class 9am to 3pm Monday to Friday, with teachers also required to work at the school for 38 hours per week.
Under the proposal, each teacher’s timetable would be grouped together to have four days of direct teaching and a fifth day allocated towards lesson planning, professional collaboration and administrative work to be done from home.
Different teachers would take different planning days, meaning schools would remain fully staffed for students throughout the week.
🪧 Union push: AEU Victorian branch president Justin Mullaly said a trial of the proposed model would allow the sector to see if it could work.
🗣️ “We want to do this because we’ve got a chronic shortage of staff in our schools,” Mullaly told 9 News.
✍️ Why now? New laws formally announced earlier this week by the State Government would give workers who can work remotely the right to work two days from home. However, this would not apply to teachers.
🏠 Home day: In conjunction with the Australian Education Union’s Victorian branch, Monash University conducted a survey of more than 8,000 Victorian state school teachers, with 65 percent supporting the idea that a four-day week model would support high-quality education.
⚖ The right balance: Elise Walker, a single mother of three and a teacher working in a State Government primary school in the south-eastern suburbs, said the “sensory overload” of teaching four days straight and then pushing all non-contact time to one day would be “more debilitating and more exhausting” than the current model, especially after being diagnosed with ADHD a couple of years ago.
🗣️ “It would break me,” Walker told the Eastern Melburnian. “I don't think it’s a terribly inclusive model for teachers.”
💻 Online options: Instead, Walker proposed introducing one day a week for online, home-based learning and spending more resources determining why teachers were leaving at such high rates.
🗣️ “We need to find out why people are moving out of this career and why are we losing people with a depth of experience and knowledge to other industries,” said Walker.
Thumbnail Image Credit: Vlada Karpovich/Pexels