Pay and respect crucial to reversing teacher recruitment crisis, NSW union says

The New South Wales Teachers Federation has blamed low pay and increasing workloads for a crisis in teaching recruitment, as a government discussion paper shows the proportion of high-achieving school graduates who choose to study teaching has dropped by a third since 2006.

The discussion paper, commissioned by the federal government, says there are fewer high-achieving candidates who want to be teachers, and talented students and mid-career professionals are finding it increasingly difficult to be supported in their studies.

The teachers federation this month warned of a statewide teacher shortage and said the government needed to “pay teachers what they are worth” to attract quality staff.

Amber Flohm, the federation’s senior vice-president, said the solution to attracting and retaining teachers was in the government’s hands.

“Central to the attraction of the highest quality of graduates is the remuneration and the respect,” she said. “And the workload and the conditions of the profession. Without addressing those matters, we will not attract and retain teachers in the numbers required.

“When young people who are at university continually read and hear politicians talk so disparagingly about teachers, with such disrespect, is it any wonder it is not a profession they choose to join? It is very tied to the remuneration and the conditions and the respect. Those are very important signals.”

Flohm said NSW would need 11,000 new teachers in the next 10 years, and 200,000 extra students were projected to enter the state’s schools over the next 20 years.

The discussion paper found that in 2019 only 4% of new graduate students with an Atar over 80 chose to study teaching, a decline of 32% between 2006 and 2019.

Over the same period, the proportion studying IT rose 62% and science 44%.

By contrast, competition for degree places in countries such as Singapore and Finland meant that “only about one in 10 students who apply to become teachers are accepted”, the paper said.

In Australia between 2009 and 2019, the number of enrolments in all tertiary courses rose 37% but those choosing teaching rose by only 4%, and the number of students who graduated from teaching or education fell 5%.

The expert panel who produced the paper also said the amount of time to complete postgraduate degrees and the loss of income while studying had contributed to a fall in the number of people switching to teaching mid-career.

On Sunday the chief executive of Catholic Schools of NSW, Dallas McInerney, said the government needed to offer more incentives for postgraduate teaching degrees, including making it a one-year degree.

McInerney told Sydney’s Daily Telegraph the shortage of teachers was a “looming crisis”.

Previously, aspiring teachers who already had qualifications could complete a one-year graduate diploma of education but this was removed in 2016 and replaced with a minimum two-year degree.

McInerney has called for the reinstatement of a one-year diploma, saying the financial pressure of the two-year degree was a major disincentive.

But Flohm said the proposal to return to one-year postgraduate degrees was a “stopgap” measure that could lower the quality of teacher education.

“We have a need for 11,000, minimum, additional teachers,” she said. “And these sort of sideshows do nothing to address what is really at the heart of attracting teachers.”

The discussion paper, released on Monday, is the first step in a review process announced by the federal education minister, Alan Tudge, in March, known as the quality initial teacher education review. The discussion paper is open to feedback, which will determine the next steps for the review.

According to research cited by the paper, the quality of teaching is responsible for 30% of the variance in student achievement, compared with 50% of variance due to the students themselves.

Writing in the Australian on Tuesday, Tudge acknowledged the gaps with countries such as Singapore and the urgent need to recruit “exceptional talent”, but blamed ideological trends in teacher education for undermining the proficiency and confidence of teachers in the classroom.

“Many teacher education faculties have been infected with dogma and teaching fads at the expense of evidence-based practices,” the minister wrote.