University deans say federal government efforts to improve the status of teaching need to be backed by better workplace conditions if mass shortages hitting the sector are to be addressed.
On Monday, the federal government announced 5,000 students in teaching degrees could register for scholarships of up to $40,000 to ease financial pressure on individuals completing placements.
The education minister, Jason Clare, said the scholarships, which required graduates to teach for up to four years in public school settings, formed part of the federal government’s plan to tackle workforce shortages.
“Teachers do one of the most important jobs in the world but we don’t have enough of them,” he said. “This … builds on our reforms to teacher training, extra uni places for teaching and the Be That Teacher campaign to elevate the profession.”
The $10m campaign, launched last week, followed the convening of a teacher education expert panel to ensure graduates were “better prepared” for the classroom.
Its discussion paper, released earlier this year, proposed strengthened standards for initial teacher education (ITE) programs and greater accountability on universities to prove their success rates.
The dean of education at Monash University, Prof Viv Ellis, said the notion ITE was failing was “not supported by evidence”.
In its submission to the review, Monash said it was “critically important” governments recognised the challenges faced by the sector were one of retention and ongoing professional development as well as recruitment.
Ellis said while the submission process was “wide open … the extent to which we were taken notice of doesn’t appear to be very comprehensive”.
He pointed to plateauing salary structures and high workloads as two key reasons teachers may be driven from the profession.
OECD data shows Australian teachers have among the largest workloads in the world, with time spent on administration 33% greater than the global average.
“We can’t get away from the fact if people are paid less and work harder it’s not going to be an attractive occupation in a vibrant job market,” Ellis said.
“I would expect Australia to be doing a lot more on those measures than we are.”
A Monash survey into ITE programs released in September found almost three-quarters of teachers reported high levels of satisfaction with their courses.
Ellis said it corroborated the federal government’s own data and past Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership Limited (AITSL) reports.
Ellis said it was also “fairly risky” to push reforms on ITE lest prospective teachers be turned away from the profession, adding the sector was “really worried” about declining first preferences and applications for teaching degrees.
“It’s a dangerous thing to be talking up and it could make the problem worse,” he said.
Ellis said governments that were “really serious” about improving the quality of teaching, including Singapore and Finland, tended to invest money in professional development rather than scholarships.
“You can’t just abandon people when they’re in the job,” Ellis said. “You can spend a lot of money on advertising, give scholarships but if the system burns them out they’ll go quite quickly.”
The Australian Catholic University (ACU), Flinders University, UNSW, Southern Cross University, La Trobe and the University of Canberra also pointed to the need to improve working conditions of teachers to attract high achievers.
The dean of education at the University of Canberra, Prof Barney Dalgarno, said it was “flimsy” to suggest the ITE review would address teacher shortages, though he understood what he said were the “political conditions” that led to its establishment.
While welcoming the scholarships and Be That Teacher campaign, Dalgarno said more needed to be done to retain existing teachers in demanding, often underresourced roles.
“If you just deal with the pipeline, spend a fortune and lose them after three years you’re nowhere,” he said. “The level of catastrophising is out step with evidence.”
Prof Sue Ledger, the dean of education at the University of Newcastle, said the sector was an “easy target”, pointing to a “huge amount of reviews” that had fanned distrust educators could do their jobs.
“We typically don’t get a voice, we’re not at the table,” she said. “We’re not given research funding to improve things, we couldn’t be more scrutinised than we already are.”
Just one of 200 grants in the Australian Research Council’s latest Discovery Early Career Researcher award were awarded to education, compared with 43 to engineering.
Ledger said Labor’s campaign to raise the status of teaching was a “good start” but still a “drop in the water” for what was needed.
“It’s great to raise the profile, to get scholarships out but we need to look at the whole ecosystem,” she said. “This is an emergency but we haven’t seen a national plan.”
