When the Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, announced a $229m workforce package earlier this month, it included news of $93m being allocated to fund scholarships for students who enrol in Victorian teaching degrees in 2024 and 2025 (provided they then commit to working in government secondary schools for at least two years). Also in September, the NSW Government announced an historic pay rise for the 95,000 teachers in that state – a pay increase that will see NSW educators become the best paid in the country.
But as the race to attract qualified teachers heats up, a key question has emerged: Are some Australian states potentially making the teacher shortage worse by actively enticing them away from other states?
Working together as one nation
According to Professor Jeffrey Brooks, the answer is ‘yes’.
He believes the Australian education sector needs a federal solution.
Professor Brooks is Head of School and Professor of Educational Leadership in the School of Education at Curtin University, with research that focuses broadly on educational leadership and examines the way leaders influence (and are influenced by) socio-cultural and organisational dynamics, such as social justice, racism, globalisation and school reform.
“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,” he says.
“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.”
By pitting states against each other to fight over teaching talent, Professor Brooks believes it will “create an inequitable nation-wide system of haves and have-nots” that has the potential to “drain communities of their education talent and future generations of tremendous community resources”.
“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,” he says. “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.”
Improving employment conditions matters
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.
“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,” she says.
“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.”
While she believes it’s been encouraging to see some efforts towards addressing these matters in recent months, Dr Stacey says “more is needed if we are to ensure that each state department of education has a healthy, thriving workforce of its own”.
“A better solution to the shortage issue in Australian schools is a meaningful engagement with the complexity of the work teaches do and, importantly, this means listening to teachers not only about the nature of their work, which they are the experts on, but also what they enjoy about it,” Dr Stacey told The Bursar. “Finding ways to support the parts of teaching that mean the most to teachers is key, I think.”
