Many challenges exist for teachers trying to secure employment in schools, particularly for those beginning their teaching career. Expectations are high from teacher education graduates that they will make an immediate transition to their 'own' classroom, as a permanent full-time teacher, once graduated. The reality is, however, that most beginning teachers in New South Wales enter the teaching profession initially on a Casual basis. This paper highlights a number of issues that contribute to the difficulties casual beginning teachers experience by exploring the supply and demand of school teachers, the increasing casualisation of the teaching workforce, and other issues compounding on casual beginning teachers. The paper concludes with the recommendation that, inter alia, different stakeholders should share information, which will result in better supply and demand relationships within the teaching profession.

This paper reports the findings of a study on the lived experiences of UNE graduates from a range of Primary and Secondary initial teacher education programmes who are employed as casual beginning teachers. Data were gathered through telephone interviews and analysed using the relatively new qualitative data software called Leximancer (Smith, 2007).