Deputy President of the NSW Teachers Federation, Henry Rajendra, was in Broken Hill recently, slamming the state government, saying he believes it has failed to properly address the teacher shortage across the state, and in particular, regional NSW, including Broken Hill.
Mr Rajendra called the situation and the state government’s response “a show of absolute disrespect” by failing school kids, while Minister for Education and Early Learning, Sarah Mitchell, saying a teacher shortage doesn’t exist and it’s more an issue of deployment out to the regions.
Current Barwon MP, Roy Butler, says, “Schemes implemented in the past to recruit more teachers for the bush have only netted a handful of teachers. I have been raising the issue of teacher shortages since I was elected, but this government has made little headway. The NSW Teachers Federation has provided a roadmap for addressing the teacher shortage, but the government has been reluctant to implement it,” he said.
“This government has failed on so many fronts in terms of adequately supporting our schools, especially throughout rural and remote parts of NSW. The evidence has long been in,” Mr Rajendra told the Barrier Truth.
“Kids deserve the highest standard of public education. That’s what should be the standard, there should be no compromise. Regrettably, and unfortunately, this government does not prioritise the kids in the bush. That’s the reality of many of our schools and for our students as well.
“The reality is, teacher shortages are from Bondi out to Broken Hill and everywhere in between. This is chronic. This is a government that continues to ignore the evidence and puts the educational opportunities of our students at grave risk.”
As of November 2022, there were 3300 unfilled permanent vacancies in NSW, with 55% of those positions within regional and rural parts of the state – and 439 vacancies across our region.
Mr Rajendra said there had been an 80% growth in the number of teachers employed in the NSW system over the last decade, though, in that same period, only a 1.0% increase in the number of permanent teachers.
Some of the incentives the state government has implemented to improve the teacher shortage in regional areas include a $10,000 stamp duty that can be claimed back and a one-off $600 payment to help build social connections.
The state government also looked to address the shortage of people studying teaching – Mr Rajendra says there’s been a decline in enrolments into teaching courses of 30% and of those enrolled, a 50% completion rate – by introducing a one-year postgraduate qualification, halving the study time of those wanting to re-qualify as an educator.
Just this week, the state government announced a $4000 cash incentive per teacher to encourage teachers to gain national Highly Accomplished and Lead Teacher (HALT) accreditation. There are currently 310 HALTs in NSW, with the Education Department setting an ambitious target of 2500 by 2025.
Even through announcing these incentives to provide aid to the schooling sector, Minister Mitchell has continually denied the existence of a teacher shortage, labelling it a “beat up” and when her own department’s documents showed vacancies had tripled in the past decade, she called it “misinformation”.
Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows NSW has one teacher for every 14.2 students – the highest ratio in the country – compared to the country average of one teacher for every 13.2 students.
Ms Mitchell said, “based on true numbers, NSW has one teacher for every 11.4 students”, which NSW Labor pointed out as being at odds with the Education Department’s annual report last year, which stated the ratio in NSW as one teacher to every 14.3 students.
The Barrier Truth reached out to each of the current 2023 state election candidates for Barwon – current member, independent Roy Butler, Labor’s Joshua Roberts-Garnsey, and Annette Turner from the Nationals – about where they sit and what should be done about the situation as the March 25 state election looms.
Despite the comments from Ms Mitchell, Ms Turner went against the state government’s line, telling us “there is a shortage”.
“I would say there’s a there is a teacher shortage but I think that the [state] government, they realise this and they’ve been proactive in trying to address the issue,” she told us.
Of the incentives and attempts to solve the wider issue, Ms Turner added, “I know it’ll be a long, slow process. It’s not going to be an immediate fix.”
“I will be constantly and consistently lobbying for the people of Barwon. I’m not removed from education. At the moment my grandchildren [are] doing School of the Air, virtual schools, so I’m involved in a lot of their education. It’s important and I will be lobbying consistently for changes and for improvements”, she said of her plans to address the issue in Barwon.
Mr Butler, who was elected as the representative for Barwon in the last state election in 2019, said the state government’s incentives for teachers to move out to regional areas “are only picking around the edges of the problem”.
“[The announcements] therefore seems to solve a political problem for the government, allowing them to be seen to be doing something about a situation that has existed for years and that keeps coming back to haunt them, but it does nothing for students and teachers right now.”
A science teacher himself at Narrabri High School, Labor’s candidate Mr Roberts-Garnsey said his “first-hand experience provides a really good insight into the issues we’re having in schools”.
“I think we’re disenfranchising thousands of kids every year by not taking action on the teaching crisis in NSW, with particular emphasis on regional NSW where teachers are becoming fewer and far between,” says Mr Roberts-Garnsey.
“I think we need to provide a system that is going to allow the future generations to achieve their goals and support them in achieving those goals,” he told us.
“The way that you see it in the classroom is that you see students probing and pushing because they have this expectation in their minds that you’re essentially going to leave them, that you’re going to abandon them. I know that there’s a lot of casualisation in this workforce, and there’s a lot of contract positions which doesn’t provide people with a lot of stability, particularly in regional areas.
“Investing in teacher pathways so we can establish our high-quality students coming out of high school, we can try and recruit them into those fields, I think that would be a really good step in the right direction. Labor has committed to establishing a $400 million Education Future Fund as well as establishing ongoing literacy and numeracy tutoring programs which, from my experience, from what I’ve seen in schools, those programs are fundamental for catching students up with those basic things of literacy and numeracy.”
