Teacher Shortage Needs a Federal Solution

The teacher shortage is acute and governments around the nation are pulling out all plugs in an attempt to attract teachers from anywhere, including the education systems of other states.

The recently ex-Premier of Victoria, Dan Andrews announced a $229m workforce package which includes $93m to fund scholarships for students who enroll in Victorian teaching degrees in 2024 and 2025 and then go on to work in government secondary schools for at least two years.

Meanwhile, the NSW Government has initiated a historic pay rise for NSW’s 95,000 teachers, which will see NSW educators go from being among the worst to the best paid in the country.

While it is nice for teachers to be in demand, poaching talent might just worsen the shortage of educators without addressing the problems underlying the issue or looking at it from a national perspective.

Professor Jeff Brooks, Head of School and Professor of Educational Leadership in the School of Education at Curtin University thinks that, "The fact that states and territories are offering incentives for people to become pre-service teachers with stipends or free degrees, and carrying out targeted ad campaigns to recruit teachers away from outside their borders is a sad state of affairs for the nation.

"Even though the teacher shortage is an Australia-wide crisis, we have no federal solution. This has compelled states and territories to compete for a scarce resource - talented pedagogical experts. There are issues that need to be addressed across the career cycle: recruitment into the profession, support for initial teacher education programs, professional experience and learning, induction into the school environment, salary, wellbeing, etc. but without an allied approach that integrates systemic federal support and guidance with local knowledge and contextual expertise, people and systems who should be cooperating are instead in competition.

"Australia is crying out for a federal solution, as staffing schools - particularly those in regional and remote areas and in certain subjects - is a common issue across states and territories. Draining talent from one state or territory to service another is a short-sighted solution that will make what should be a coordinated approach into a cobbled together patchwork of non-sustainable solutions. Rural and regional schools and communities are likely to suffer most from this.   

"Pitting states against each other to fight over teaching talent will create an inequitable nation-wide system of haves and have-nots. It will drain communities of their education talent and future generations of tremendous community resources. Increasing competition in education is a failed experiment - for example, charter schools in the United States have not yielded educational gains and in many cases have exacerbated inequity.

"Teachers should be paid more. They should be supported more. We should do more to raise the status of the profession and recognise their key role in shaping the future of local communities, states/territories and Australia. But I can’t see that pitting states against one another is the way to increase quality or equity. This way of thinking about the issue is applying a market-driven mentality to an educational problem.

Decades old research highlighted issues that make teaching more onerous than it should be. Teachers are often not given substantial time to be successful, report job dissatisfaction, low salary, lack of promotional opportunities, poor accommodations, lack of upgrading opportunities, lack of adequate teaching materials, local and national economic trends, societal factors related to status of the profession, institutional factors, and lack of mentoring or administrative support compel people to leave the profession. More recently, studies indicate that teachers face psycho-social wellbeing issues at alarming rates.

Addressing all these issues might go a long way to encouraging people into the profession or encouraging experienced teaches to stay.

"I would suggest that if we really want to address these shortages, that paying teachers more, improving their working conditions, and offering them meaningful professional growth opportunities are important. But it is equally important to rethink the professional relationships and networks that sustain teaching across the nation. By this I mean that: states should work together, not in competition; teachers should be seen as high-value members of their community and be remunerated for their contributions, and; university-based initial teacher education programs, state and federal government should work in partnership to create pathways into teaching that are characterised by complementary offerings that ensure high-quality that span initial teacher education into the first five years of the career."

Dr Meghan Stacey is a Senior Lecturer in the UNSW School of Education, researching in the fields of the Sociology of Education and Education Policy and with a particular interest in teachers' work agrees that teacher poaching is not a solution.

"Offering scholarships and bonuses to pre-service teachers with an attached term of employment is not a new idea, in state departments of education or otherwise.

"While these may be enticing for some future teachers, it’s unlikely that such schemes will be enough to solve the current crisis facing Australian schools.

"Ongoing, profession-wide improvements in working and employment conditions are required across state departments of education. This includes real improvements in salary as well as effective measures to address widespread experiences of heavy workload and work intensity.

"It’s been encouraging to see some efforts towards addressing these matters in recent months, but more is needed if we are to ensure that each state department of education has a healthy, thriving workforce of its own."