Originally published in Education Quarterly, Issue 18 2026
President writes by Henry Rajendra
Every teacher in NSW knows why preparation time matters. It’s the time we use to plan the lesson that reaches the kid at the back of the room. It’s the time we use to talk to an occupational or speech therapist about the student whose needs have changed. It’s the time we use to mark work properly, to phone parents, to adjust tomorrow’s lesson based on what happened in today’s lesson.
It is, in the most basic sense, the time we use to teach well.
That time has not kept pace with the job. NSW primary teachers still receive around two hours of preparation time each week — unchanged since the 1980s. Secondary teachers have had no increase since the 1950s.
In the meantime, the number of students with disability in NSW public schools has risen by 75 per cent to more than 220,000, with 86 per cent learning in mainstream settings, and the curriculum keeps changing. Cultural and linguistic diversity has deepened.
Our work is more complex and demanding in every possible way yet the conditions to adapt remain static.
First and foremost, this is a question of what we owe students. On that, the evidence is in. The Gallop Inquiry recommended two additional hours of preparation time a week as a matter of urgency. That was four years ago.
Every NSW public school student deserves a teacher with the time and bandwidth to plan for them. To understand their needs and properly calibrate a lesson. That is the moral case for preparation time — and it would exist whether or not the issue is politically popular.
But as it happens, it is overwhelmingly popular.
We commissioned the Redbridge Group to probe public opinion on this issue — this is where preparation time becomes important reading for the government. When more than 2000 NSW voters were asked what would most improve public education, 42 per cent said ‘investing in and supporting teachers’. That was more than double the next option. Support was strong among Labor, Coalition and Greens voters.
Participants in focus groups went even further. Parents described the modern classroom in terms any teacher would recognise, talking about the need to “accommodate all the different needs” and calling the comparison with classrooms of previous decades “chalk and cheese”.
Importantly, support is resilient. Even when voters were presented with counter-arguments that investing in preparation time would detract from other government priorities, net support stayed above 50 per cent.
In the focus groups, that argument actually generated anger. One voter described it as “saying that education is not as important … that annoys me a little bit”. Voters see the trade-off framing as a false choice, and they push back on it.
The Minns Government has done genuinely significant work on public education. We have competitive salaries for the first time in a decade, a commitment to lift funding to the Gonski standard and thousands of teachers have been made permanent.
An agreement on preparation time would allow them to tell a big story about rebuilding public ducation. In fact, voters were 23 per cent more likely to support the policy when they learned it was endorsed by Federation.
It would also activate tens of thousands of teachers to communicate the reality of the rebuild. The case for preparation time begins with students. The political case is that doing right by them is also the smartest thing the government could do.
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