Fewer than one in four Australian high school students have a qualified maths teacher and the situation is about to get worse, with a projected boom in student numbers following a 30-year decline in the supply of new maths-trained teachers.
"The current difficulties with out-of-field teaching, and meeting the needs of increased enrolments, is compounded by Australia not having prepared enough mathematics teachers for years," a report by the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute has found.
Programs to retrain existing teachers in maths are long overdue and are now likely the only way left to address a shortage, new research has found.
About 75 per cent of students in years 7 to 10 are already being taught maths for at least one year by a teacher not trained in the subject area and the situation is set to worsen, with an expected 650,000 extra students across the country by 2026.
The report's co-author Jan Thomas, a senior fellow at AMSI, said programs to retrain existing teachers in maths are long overdue and are now likely the only way left to address the shortage.
"In 1987, when I was a research officer for a Victorian government study, we picked up that there was an emerging problem there. I still remember the shock I got when we realised the way schools were coping was to reduce maths classes from 240 minutes to 200 minutes," Ms Thomas said.
"From the 1980s, we've known that unless we did something there were going to be more out-of-field teachers, and that's exactly what happened.
"It's now past when the government should have done something and the only way we can get more qualified teachers into schools quickly is to retrain existing teachers in other areas who are already being asked to teach maths."
Ms Thomas said any successful programs would need to be broken into small, flexible units that could be combined to make up a qualification and be completed during breaks in teaching periods.
AMSI's director Tim Brown said the problem will continue getting worse as students now being taught maths by out-of-field teachers enter university.
"The problem has not been addressed to the extent that many Australian children are already not getting quality of education with learning maths that would be ideal and this proportion is going to jump, which will mean more teachers in the future are going to be [less developed] in their own maths knowledge and confidence," Professor Brown said.
Decisions to become a maths teacher often start with studying high-level maths in year 12, and the proportion of year 12 students doing these subjects fell 32 per cent between 1996 and 2014, according to the report.
Furthermore, only about 62 per cent of schools in NSW, Victoria and Queensland were offering the highest-level maths courses last year, the report has found.
Australia is also falling behind other countries in the number of university graduates it produces with maths and statistics qualification, with 0.4 per cent of university students graduating with these degrees from 2003 to 2014, compared with an average of 1 per cent of students across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
The effects of the problem are also visible in Australian students' declining performance in international tests, the report says.
Australian students have gone from significantly outperforming their peers in the US and Britain in the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study tests in 1995 to consistently scoring worse than students in these countries since 2007.
The report notes the NSW government is one of the only governments providing scholarships and other incentives for teachers to study more maths and teach in rural and remote areas but finds that no government has implemented comprehensive retraining programs for existing teachers.
Professor Brown said the issue is an urgent one that AMSI will raise with the federal government after next week's election.
"It's obviously a matter for state and territory governments too but it's something that needs to be done at the national level and should have happened a long time ago," Professor Brown said.