The NSW education system is protecting under-performing teachers who should never have been accepted into teaching degrees, a parliamentary inquiry has reported.
An upper house committee tasked with investigating the teacher shortage gripping NSW concluded poor academic performance by students was the result of teachers who had "barely passed their high school certificates".
Inquiry chair One Nation Leader Mark Latham said classroom teaching in NSW was "not up to scratch" and the whole system was at a "tipping point".
"The students have not learnt because the teachers have not taught. The quality of teaching in our state has not been sufficient to keep pace with our international competitors, and even our past performance," the report stated.
"New South Wales is paying a hefty price for a schools industrial system that protects under-performing teachers and puffs up generous working conditions at the expense of professional excellence."
The committee's report blamed this on the university sector for accepting school leavers with low Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATARs) and believing anyone could become a good teacher.
"This is a delusional policy, out of line with reality and public expectations that those who teach in schools were themselves good at schoolwork," the report said.
"In 2022… according to Universities Admissions Centre data, the lowest ATAR for a student accepted into a Bachelor of Education degree was 53.50 at Newcastle University."
In 2018 the NSW government announced a plan to eradicate low-quality teachers after reports that 28 students had been accepted into teaching degrees with ATARs between 0 and 19.
The new plan to ensure the state only hired the "best and brightest" introduced a requirement to have a credit grade average.
"Teaching is not a career that just anyone can do," then education minister Rob Stokes said at the time.
However, the inquiry said this policy had not been implemented as promised and the Department of Education informed them it wouldn't be in force until 2023.
The committee also recommended NSW follow Britain's suit by setting a dismissal rate of 3 per cent per year in order to weed out substandard teachers and increase accountability.
Only two to three teachers are sacked for incompetence per year in NSW, the report said.
The inquiry committee, which was made up of seven upper house members, was not unanimous when it came to attributing blame for the teacher shortage though.
The Greens and Labor members on the committee raised concerns about the contents of the report, with Greens MLC Abigail Boyd calling it an "incoherent grab bag" of Mr Latham's opinions.
"This report is groaning under the weight of the chair's baseless claims, ideological bugbears and disdain for the hundreds of thousands of school staff working across NSW,” Ms Boyd said in her dissenting statement.
She said people would be better off reading the recommendations of the 2021 Geoff Gallop report commissioned by the Teachers Federation in 2020 which found without an increase in salaries, the NSW government could not end the teacher shortage.
Labor's Courtney Houssos and Anthony D'Adam also offered dissenting statements, with Mr D'Adam saying the committee had got it "catastrophically wrong" and that blaming universities was unfair and part of an agenda at work.
Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said the committee's report needed to be taken with a "grain of salt" as the majority of members were from Labor and the crossbench and it was a "missed opportunity" to come up with new ways to solve staffing problems.
The NSW government said their modelling shows there is adequate teacher supply to meet demand until at least 2025 but there are "constraints" with supply in some subjects including science and maths.
