Casual Nurse Educators Report Surprisingly Positive Work Lives, Australian Study Finds

Behind every surge in nursing student enrolments stands an army of teachers who are rarely on the payroll in any permanent sense. They mark assignments at kitchen tables, facilitate clinical placements between hospital shifts and lecture on short notice, often without the security of a continuing contract. A new cross-sectional study published in Nursing Open has now provided one of the first national quantitative portraits of this hidden teaching workforce, surveying sessional nursing staff across Australian universities and measuring their psychosocial working conditions with a validated workplace instrument. The results complicate the familiar narrative of the exploited casual academic, revealing a group that reports high job satisfaction, strong collegial support and a deep sense of meaning in their work, even as most have no intention of ever taking a permanent academic post.

The context for the research is a global nursing shortage of staggering proportions. The World Health Organization projects a deficit of nearly 4.5 million nurses by 2030, driven by ageing workforces, poor working conditions, inadequate recruitment planning and the steady exit of practising nurses from clinical roles. In response, international bodies have called for expanded nurse education, and universities have enrolled more students to meet the demand. That expansion has created an urgent need for more educators, and universities have met much of it by hiring sessional staff: registered nurses employed casually to teach, mark and facilitate placements without fixed-term or continuing contracts. In Australia, nearly 60 percent of the academic workforce is now non-permanent, a figure that mirrors or exceeds the casualisation seen in the United States, where roughly 70 percent of academics are sessional, and the United Kingdom, where 54 percent hold non-continuing positions.

Despite this scale, the experiences of sessional staff specifically within pre-registration nursing education have remained poorly documented. Previous studies tended to examine permanent nursing academics or casual academics across disciplines, leaving a gap in understanding of the distinct psychosocial conditions faced by nurses teaching the next generation of registrants. The new study, led by researchers at Australian Catholic University and conducted in August 2024, aimed to close that gap using the middle-length version of the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire version III, a widely used workplace risk assessment tool comprising 26 subscales and 60 items scored on five-point Likert scales calibrated from 0 to 100. The survey was distributed through heads of discipline at 34 Australian institutions offering approved pre-registration nursing programmes, supplemented by advertising through the Australian College of Nursing and LinkedIn.

Of 99 responses received, 84 participants met the eligibility criteria, which required current registration with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, at least 12 months of sessional experience and active work in a pre-registration programme. The respondents represented 25 of the 34 institutions contacted, an institutional coverage of 73.5 percent. The demographic profile was striking. More than half of the participants were over 50 years old, 83.3 percent were female, and 89.2 percent had more than a decade of experience as registered health professionals. Yet 58.3 percent had fewer than five years of experience as sessional university staff, indicating that many were recent arrivals to academia, bringing deep clinical expertise but limited teaching tenure. Nearly two-thirds still worked clinically, and 71.4 percent carried carer responsibilities.

The psychosocial findings defied expectations. Participants reported favourable scores on ten resource-related subscales, with the highest mean score, 79.61 out of 100, recorded for meaning of work, followed by role clarity at 74.66. Job satisfaction averaged 61.85, and social support from supervisors and colleagues, vertical and horizontal trust, sense of community, quality of work and possibilities for development all clustered above 60. On the demand side, the picture was equally benign: insecurity over working conditions scored just 22.07, work-life conflict 27.64, emotional demands 30.15 and job insecurity 32.57, all indicating low perceived strain. For a workforce typically described as precarious, hourly-paid and hired at short notice, these figures suggest that the sessional nurses in this sample did not experience their employment as threatening or destabilising.

The correlation analysis revealed which factors travelled together. Job satisfaction correlated strongly with organisational justice (r = 0.82), vertical trust (r = 0.81), quality of leadership (r = 0.79) and role clarity (r = 0.70), all statistically significant at p < 0.001. Sense of community was tightly bound to social support from colleagues (r = 0.77) and supervisors (r = 0.70), while supervisor support itself correlated with quality of leadership (r = 0.73) and vertical trust (r = 0.73). In plain terms, sessional nurses who felt fairly treated, trusted by management, clearly briefed and well led were also the ones who enjoyed their work and felt they belonged. The authors used Spearman rank correlations appropriate to the ordinal Likert data, with confidence intervals derived through Fisher’s r-to-z transformation, and framed the analysis as exploratory, without adjustment for multiple testing.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns career aspiration. Only 26.2 percent of participants intended to seek a permanent academic position, while 40.5 percent said maybe and 27.4 percent said no. This pattern likely reflects both preference and pragmatism. Sessional work offers flexibility that permanent roles rarely match, allowing nurses to combine teaching with clinical practice, caring duties and personal commitments, and to work remotely on lecturing, facilitation and marking. For some, sessional teaching is a pathway into academia; for others, it is a deliberately bounded form of engagement that avoids the heavier research, administrative and service load of continuing appointments. The authors suggest universities should read this as a signal to support both trajectories, offering professional development in teaching pedagogy for those who want to grow, and respecting the flexibility that draws others to casual work in the first place.

The study’s authors are careful to temper these rosy findings with methodological caveats. No national sampling frame exists for the Australian sessional nursing academic workforce, so convenience sampling was unavoidable and representativeness could not be verified. Self-selection bias is a real possibility: staff with more positive or stable experiences may simply have been more likely to respond, which could partly explain the low reported job insecurity and the complete absence of negative correlations between the focal subscales and other measures. Internal consistency of the questionnaire subscales varied, with Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from 0.564 to 0.922, and the work pace subscale performed so poorly (alpha = 0.285) that it was excluded entirely. The middle-length instrument also omitted stress, burnout, violence and harassment, domains covered in the long version that might have surfaced darker aspects of the experience. As a cross-sectional design, the study can report associations but cannot establish causation.

Even with those limitations, the study carries practical weight for workforce planning. The age profile of the sample, with over half of participants above 50, contrasts sharply with the registered nursing workforce at large, where only about 30 percent fall into that age bracket. Nurses appear to move into teaching later in their careers, often after establishing clinical credentials, motivated by a desire to give back to the profession, to escape clinical burnout or to transition toward retirement while staying engaged. These educators bridge theory and practice, contextualising real-world clinical realities for students in ways that purely academic staff cannot. But heavy reliance on them carries risks: high turnover and short tenure can disrupt teaching continuity, assessment consistency and the sustained mentorship relationships that help students develop clinical reasoning and professional identity. Universities may also face repeated onboarding costs as casual teaching teams change each semester.

The study’s conclusion is a call for balance rather than alarm. Sessional nursing educators in this sample reported trusting relationships with leadership, fair conflict resolution, autonomy in their work and a genuine sense of shaping the future nursing workforce, and those conditions correlated closely with their satisfaction. The authors argue that universities should continue engaging clinical experts within a balanced staffing model, one that strengthens organisational support for sessional staff through clear role expectations, timely communication, quality leadership and professional development, while ensuring that the administrative and coordination burdens of nursing programmes do not simply accumulate on permanent academics. As the global nurse shortage deepens and student numbers climb, the mostly invisible casual teachers standing at the front of the classroom may prove to be one of the most valuable, and most fragile, assets in the effort to educate the nurses the world will need by 2030.

Subject of Research: Psychosocial working conditions and job satisfaction of sessional teaching staff in pre-registration nursing education programmes in Australia

Article Title: Work Experience of Sessional Teaching Staff in Pre‐Registration Nursing Programmes: A Cross‐Sectional Study

Article References: Ricks, T. A., Jacob, E., & Lam, L. (2026). Work Experience of Sessional Teaching Staff in Pre‐Registration Nursing Programmes: A Cross‐Sectional Study. Nursing Open, 13(10), Article e70862. https://doi.org/10.1002/nop2.70862

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/nop2.70862

Keywords: nursing education, sessional staff, casual academics, job satisfaction, psychosocial work environment, COPSOQ-III, nursing workforce shortage, Australia, pre-registration nursing, higher education casualisation, cross-sectional study, workforce sustainability