2.0 Address the teacher shortage
The current teacher shortage crisis has been more than a decade in the making. At the heart of it is a lack of respect for the profession and a failure to value and reward the expertise that teachers bring to the challenging work they do. It impacts upon attraction of new teachers to the profession and affects retention rates. Changing professional expectations and demands, which have not been backed up with support and resourcing, have created crippling, unsustainable workloads within the profession. This has led to teacher burnout, early retirements, and a lack of interest in people seeking to become new entrants to the profession. A scarcity of professional mentoring and support for graduates, and a failure to appropriately compensate those who provide that support in schools, adds to the problem.
Additionally, there has been a failure to adopt recruitment practices that reflect the varied needs of schools across the state. Rural, regional and remote areas, disadvantaged regions and settings that educate students in positive learning centres and correctional centres require a differentiated staffing model and targeted resourcing to address their needs. The teacher shortage is directly linked to this general lack of respect for the profession and the absence of appropriate resourcing to provide support for teachers throughout the course of their teaching careers.
The QTU’s 2022 Teacher Shortage Survey showed 65.5 per cent of the school leaders who responded were experiencing difficulty staffing year levels or subjects. Figure 2 below shows that the majority of responding school leaders from each region also indicated this staffing difficulty.
Figure 2: Region staffing difficulty, percent of region total
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Many of the issues and recommendations outlined below align to the 2022 Federal Teacher Workforce Shortages paper, which recommends improving working conditions and pathways to the profession to promote attraction and retention (DoE 2022).
The QTU believes that the attraction and retention of high-quality teachers can best be achieved through the following.
2.1 Supporting new and beginning teachers
- Investing in, and improving access to, high quality mentoring and beginning teacher (MBT) programs undertaken at the school level (not only via online “training”).
- Increasing the time period for access to MBT support, resourcing and the Teacher Relief Scheme (TRS) to three years subsequent to entry into the workforce.Developing and resourcing appropriate statewide induction programs for beginning teachers that are consistently applied.
- Providing targeted support, specifically designed to assist teachers who are commencing their careers under the “Permission to Teach” registration provisions, to ensure their work and study commitments can be managed.
- Establishing a centrally-funded, dedicated beginning teacher support team, available to assist the multitude of new teachers who commence each year and to guide the teachers who are supporting beginning teachers, with resources, guidance, professional development (PD) and professional assistance.
2.2 Attracting new entrants to the profession
- An ongoing commitment to increasing beginning teacher salaries, to ensure they remain the among the highest in the country.
- Supporting research programs that investigate and determine the most effective initial teacher education (ITE) programs, to ensure teaching entrants have access to well-designed teacher education and training.
- Committing meaningfully to internship programs, by ensuring supervising teacher support for interns is provided throughout the internship year.
- Increasing resourcing for internship programs to fund supervisor remuneration and release time.
- Working with teacher registration bodies and federal agencies to remove barriers to ITE programs - reconsider Non-Academic Requirement for Teacher Education (NARTE) and Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education (LANTITE).
- Working with federal governments to expedite visas for appropriately qualified overseas-trained teachers, including expatriate teachers, to work in rural and remote Queensland.
2.3 Retention of experienced teachers and education leaders
- Developing effective staffing and budgetary responses that arise out of the allocative methodology review to manage the complexities of 21st century schooling.
- The allocation of sufficient funds for measures that will reduce workload as per the workload reduction recommendations (see page 17).
- Increased funding to provide professional support in areas related to curriculum development, pedagogy, planning and preparation, capability development and professional development (see Section 4.0).
- Recognising and investing in the teachers providing mentoring and guidance to beginning teachers via improved support, release time and remuneration.
2.4 Improved salaries and conditions
- Maximising permanent employment for all teachers and reducing reliance upon casualised and temporary teaching staff.
- A commitment to negotiate increased steps in the teacher classification stream.
- A commitment to negotiate improvements to the education leaders’ streams.
- Participation in the national review of the highly accomplished (HAT) and lead teacher certification processes to ensure increased access to these classification levels by Queensland teachers.
2.5 Attraction of staff to rural, remote and difficult-to-staff locations
- Utilise the review of the state schools resourcing model to determine a differentiated staffing and resourcing model, supporting the management of inclusive classroom practices and learning in the most disadvantaged communities.
- Short-term expansion of the current “rapid response team” to immediately address the teacher shortage crisis.
- Improving the provision of subsidised teacher accommodation in hard-to-staff locations, including access to subsidised private rental properties in locations with no teacher housing available (see Section 6).
- Commit to improving allowances for Recognition of Rural and Remote Service (RoRRS) (see Section 6).
- Adopting differentiated attraction packages to encourage employment in rural and remote locations – i.e higher salaries and incentives, elimination of Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) and Higher Education Loan Program (HELP) debts.
2.6 Address the gender pay gap
- Increase paid parental leave to 26 weeks in the first year of a child’s life and allow for this entitlement to be shared between both parents.
- Include paid parental leave in superannuation guarantee payments, allowing new parents an uninterrupted accumulation of superannuation savings and reducing the gap upon retirement.
- Publicise widely information that highlights that leadership roles can be undertaken in a part-time capacity, and actively encourage access to these leadership roles, to ensure that women continue to apply for and work in leadership positions, particularly when they might be managing family and other responsibilities.
2.7 Develop respect for the profession
- Develop a respectful long-term “whole-of-career” approach to the profession, via recognition, remuneration and resourcing.
- Support autonomous, professional decision-making by educators.
- Replace the compliance and corporate “accountability” approach to education with one that values and respects the expertise, commitment and capability of the profession.
- Underpin respect for the profession with a budgetary approach that provides significant increases in the education budget to enable teachers to teach and education leaders to guide them.
RECOMMENDATIONS
6. Support new graduates via improvements to resourcing of mentoring and beginning teacher (MBT) and induction programs.
7. Attract new entrants to the profession with competitive salaries and conditions.
8. Invest in research into initial teacher education (ITE) programs to identify what constitutes state-of-the art teaching preparation.
9. Use the review into the allocative methodology to improve the retention of experienced teachers and education leaders, with appropriate staffing and resourcing to manage increasingly complex school contexts, unsustainable workload demands and ever-changing professional responsibilities.
10. Continue to improve salaries and conditions to ensure that the Queensland state education system attracts and retains the best teachers.
11. Commit to employing a sufficient number of new teachers to replace those exiting the profession or on leave, cover enrolment growth and put downward pressure on class sizes.
12. Address the gender pay gap with improvements to parental leave and superannuation.
13. Use the review into the allocative methodology to improve the attraction of staff to rural, remote and difficult-to-staff locations by adopting a differentiated staffing and resourcing model that recognises and addresses the staffing needs arising from Queensland’s challenging geographical context.
14. Develop a Department of Education culture that respects the profession.
QTU State Budget Submission 2023-24