What is a relief teacher?
Relief teachers work on a short-term basis, standing in for teachers who need to be away from their regular classroom for a few hours or longer. They may be asked by a school to replace 1 or multiple teachers across various year levels.
Temporary teachers or contract teachers are employed for a minimum of 5 days. These temporary engagements can be part time (e.g. every Monday and Tuesday for 4 weeks) or full time (e.g. Monday to Friday).
Casual teachers are also sometimes known as replacement teachers or supply teachers. These casual engagements can be for a minimum of 2 hours and up to a standard teaching day of 5 hours.
Benefits of relief teaching
The key benefits of relief teaching are the flexibility and diversity:
- schedule work around your personal commitments
- experience a diverse range of school environments and classroom settings
- select the schools, year levels and subjects you want to teach
- get paid on an hourly basis.
TRACER (Teacher Relief and Contract Employment Register)
If you select 'casual' as one of your employment preferences on your
application for teacher employment, you’ll automatically be added to our Teacher Relief and Contract Employment Register (often referred to as TRACER) the business day after your application to teach has been processed.
TRACER is a service provided by the department to manage placements for relief teachers.
If you are a job seeker, keep in mind there are additional methods for
finding teaching jobs in Queensland.
More information about TRACER for relief teachers is available on the department’s
supply teachers page.
If your teacher employment application has already been processed, you can log in to TRACER.
For queries regarding the teacher application process, contact the department by email at
teacherapplications@qed.qld.gov.au.
For queries regarding TRACER, contact the TRACER team by email at
tracer@qed.qld.gov.au.