Moral injury—a construct originating in military psychology—has recently gained traction as a framework for understanding the ethical and emotional distress experienced by professionals in caregiving and high-stakes environments. In education, moral injury offers a valuable lens for examining how systemic constraints, institutional betrayals, and ethical dissonance contribute to teacher burnout and attrition. This paper investigates moral injury within the Australian teaching profession, exploring its systemic roots, lived manifestations, and implications for workforce sustainability.
Drawing on qualitative data from 57 Australian educators, this study identifies three interrelated constructs underpinning teachers’ experiences of moral injury: betrayal, ethical conflict, and systemic pressures. Teachers described feeling abandoned by leadership, constrained by contradictory policy mandates, and overwhelmed by chronic under-resourcing and administrative overload. These conditions left many feeling disempowered, unable to act in alignment with their moral and professional values, and questioning their efficacy and purpose. The emotional toll of these systemic factors was often compounded by experiences of compassion fatigue and secondary traumatic stress, highlighting the intersection between ethical distress and emotional exhaustion in teaching.
Using Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory as an analytic framework, the study situates moral injury within a multi-layered ecological context. At the microsystem level, moral injury emerges in strained teacher–student and teacher–leadership relationships, where ethical conflicts play out in daily interactions. The mesosystem highlights tensions between schools, families, and communities, where conflicting expectations create persistent moral dilemmas. Within the exosystem, institutional policies—such as rigid accountability regimes and punitive disciplinary frameworks—generate environments in which teachers are expected to enact practices that contradict their values. The macrosystem exposes how cultural narratives that idealise teaching as a vocation, rather than a profession, sustain unrealistic expectations and justify systemic neglect. Finally, the chronosystem reveals how ongoing reforms, funding cuts, and crises such as COVID-19 amplify existing inequities and moral strain over time.
By framing moral injury as a systemic phenomenon rather than an individual psychological condition, this research challenges deficit-oriented approaches that locate teacher distress in personal resilience or coping failure. Instead, it calls attention to the structural conditions that erode teachers’ ethical agency and professional identity. The paper argues for multi-level reforms that address the institutional roots of moral injury, including equitable resource allocation, reduced bureaucratic workload, trauma-informed leadership, and professional development focused on ethical decision-making and reflective practice.
Ultimately, the study reframes moral injury as a collective moral responsibility within education systems. Supporting teachers to act in accordance with their values requires not only individual strategies but systemic change—ensuring that educational environments honour the moral, emotional, and professional integrity essential to sustainable teaching and learning.