Cramming postgraduate degrees into a single year to plug a chronic teacher shortage has been dismissed as inadequate by experts in a new federal education report.
It's a blow for the NSW government days before the state election, after the strategy was endorsed as a key plank to address the dearth of teachers.
A panel, established in 2022 by the federal government and tasked with improving initial teacher education to boost graduation rates, said a two-year masters degree was best to prepare teachers for classrooms.
"The panel does not see a case for returning to a one-year graduate diploma of education as a way of shortening the time spent out of the workforce," the Teacher Expert Education Panel report published on Thursday said.
It described the qualification as "not academically and professionally proportionate with the complexity and status of teaching".
NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet, who has been on the campaign trail ahead of Saturday's election, has backed a Productivity Commission proposal to get graduates in the classroom as soon as they complete the one-year postgraduate course.
"I don't want a single person who is considering starting this fantastic career to be deterred by an unnecessary additional year in their training," he said in January.
The panel is chaired by former NSW Education secretary and ex-ABC managing director Mark Scott who is now vice-chancellor at the University of Sydney.
Further to Thursday's report, he noted there could be a middle-ground solution.
"We know we need to increase the numbers of mid-career entrants into teaching and make this an attractive option," he said in a statement to AAP.
"There is an opportunity to deliver accelerated academic pathways as part of a masters degree and we want to explore how masters degrees could be structured so that mid-career entrants can be in the classroom within 12-18 months."
NSW Teachers Federation president Angelo Gavrielatos said the panel's rejection of a one-year qualification shows the government had run out of ideas to recruit teachers.
"Cutting qualifications and bringing in untrained teachers into NSW classrooms, as Mr Perrottet plans to do, would be an unmitigated disaster for NSW," he said.
"It won't fix the teacher shortage because the retention rates of these teachers are far worse than fully trained teachers."
There are more than 3300 teaching vacancies across the state, with 55 per cent of all vacancies outside major cities.
"To make teaching more attractive and stop the shortages we need to address unsustainable workloads and uncompetitive salaries," Mr Gavrielatos said.
The report also noted "financial barriers are the most significant barrier to entry for mid-career cohorts" including "the pay cut commonly incurred when switching to teaching".
Mr Gavrielatos blamed the government's three per cent wage cap as one of the main factors driving teachers out of the profession.
The premier said his government has "a fair and reasonable approach when it comes to wages".
Labor has promised to convert 10,000 casual teaching positions into permanent roles along with scrapping the wage cap.
