NSW Department of Education mathematic teacher shortage levels revealed

One in five maths classes are now taught by out-of-area teachers and a plan to fix it by importing foreigners has been compared to the hunger games because other countries have the same problem.

A PLAN to import teachers from the UK, Canada and New Zealand to fix a shortage of teachers in the state’s public schools has been attacked in NSW Parliament as destined to fail because there is a “global hunger games” for qualified teachers.

Greens MP David Shoebridge asked Education Minister Sarah Mitchell in Budget Estimates in NSW Parliament if she was aware that the very countries the Department planned to poach existing teachers from were already suffering their own teacher shortage.

“It is going to be a hunger games out there for teachers over the next four or five years and NSW is likely to see a bunch of its highly skilled teachers being poached from Victoria, by Queensland and New Zealand and the United Kingdom,” Mr Shoebridge said.

Education Minister Sarah Mitchell in the budget estimates hearing said there was a range of initiatives to address issues with teacher shortages.

“NSW is a great place to work, our public schools are some of the best so we are proud of that and we want to promote that to attract high quality teachers to NSW,” she said.

Ms Mitchell said a six-month qualification for mid-career STEM professionals so they could become teachers was being developed to fix the shortage of teachers in maths and science subjects.

“We have begun conversations with a number of universities,” she said.

“This is about making sure that we want to have the teachers that we need in the subject areas where we need them.”

As revealed by the Daily Telegraph today, one in five maths classes in some rural areas of NSW are taught by teachers who lack any maths training in a situation bureaucrats admit is contributing to the disparity between city and rural schools when it comes to results.

The data was contained in a memo to Education Minister Sarah Mitchell noted while maths classes in metropolitan areas of the state were taught by an out of subject area teacher between seven and nine per cent of the time, in rural schools that figure grew to 22 per cent in the rural south and west of the state.

NSW Opposition education spokeswoman Prue Car. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Christian Gilles

English was also taught by non-qualified teachers just seven per cent of the time in metropolitan school regions while 20 per cent of the time in schools in the rural south and west areas of the state.

“This may contribute to the performance gap between rural and metropolitan schools,” it said. The December 2020 document said there was a shortfall of 292 maths teachers for those in Years 7-10 and 518 technological and applied studies teachers.

Opposition education spokeswoman Prue Car on Monday said the shortfall was effectively creating a two-tier education system between students in the city and the regions. “It is completely unacceptable – the NSW public education system is supposed to provide a quality education no matter where you live,” she said.

Education Minister Sarah Mitchell. Picture: Darren Leigh Roberts

“Education Minister Sarah Mitchell has been briefed on the teacher shortage consistently, and they just haven’t done enough to recruit bright STEM teachers in the areas where we need them.”

Another document released to Labor found that a “teach. MathsNOW” scholarship program designed to attract intelligent university students into the profession had only been awarded to 14 people after 99 students applied in 2019 and only 39 applicants were successful last year.

According to the latest NAPLAN results from 2019, 20 per cent of students living in “very remote” NSW are below the national minimum standard when it comes to Year 9 maths.

Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said: “It is no secret that at times, staffing schools in regional areas with great teachers in the right subject areas can be a challenge. This is not unique to NSW.”
“The reason the opposition has this research is because we commissioned it to better understand the challenges with teacher supply in the regions and how best to solve them.
“Whilst the opposition waves around research commissioned by our government, we are taking action and implementing millions of dollars’ worth of initiatives to strengthen the pipeline of teachers coming into the profession both now and into the future.”