Planning For Unmet Social Needs In Pandemics: Teachers' Experiences Of Unacknowledged Care Work

This paper examines the experiences of teachers in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic from a care ethics perspective. While pandemic preparedness plans prioritised continuity of services and infection control, they failed to anticipate the relational and moral labour required of frontline workers in non-clinical roles. Paradoxically, otherwise prudent and precautionary responses to the risks posed by the pandemic established new barriers to care and human connection and exacerbated existing ones. Drawing on 32 qualitative interviews with teachers, we analyse how they engaged in improvised, context-specific practices of care. We distinguish between care initiated by workers and care requested of them, highlighting asymmetries. We argue that the pandemic exposed and intensified structurally patterned inequities in the distribution and valuation of care work and that existing accounts of care ethics do not sufficiently explain community care performed by teachers. The paper calls for pandemic planners to explicitly anticipate the needs that public health restrictions create and acknowledge and centre care as a communal good. This is because when care is invisible, it is not planned for, acknowledged or supported. Ignoring it exposes persistent institutional failures to recognise and sustain the everyday labour that holds society together in times of crisis.