Recruitment Beyond NSW teacher hiring program has 80pc fail rate

Almost 80 per cent of applicants to a program aimed at attracting overseas teachers to regional NSW have been deemed unsuitable or have pulled out, secret emails have revealed.

Secret emails have exposed the NSW government’s struggle to recruit teachers, with almost half of 3100 applications from overseas rejected as “unsuitable” and one-third later found to be “not interested”.

Despite offering a generous $10,000 retention payment and assistance with visas and relocation costs, the NSW government has fallen well short of its target of filling 500 teaching roles by mid-2024, with a focus on covering shortages in the bush.

The figures for March this year are contained in NSW Department of Education documents released to state parliament on the Recruitment Beyond NSW program.

The $13.5 million scheme was launched in September to fill critical science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) teacher shortages.

An email dated March 8 from the department’s school workforce “delivery and oversight” unit shows the vast majority of candidates were being struck out.

The Recruitment Beyond NSW program to hire new teachers has a high fail rate. Picture: iStock

The email stated that of the 3183 applications — 2888 from overseas and 295 from Australia — 1363 had been found to be “unsuitable” as a result of “missing experience”, or not having a teaching background.

Another 1111 candidates were deemed “not interested” after being struck off or pulling out of the process because they were unwilling to teach at a regional school, had little interest in relocating, or had become uncontactable after lodging their initial application.

The email stated another 318 candidates were yet to provide more information to the recruitment agency before being considered, leaving 371 deemed “suitable” for progressing to the next stage.

Separate documents showed the government was expecting to recruit “80-200 teachers” in the first year of the program, 260 in the second and 200 in the third year.

The Telegraph has reported on schools merging student classes on a weekly basis and staff being forced to teach subjects in which they are not trained amid a dire teacher shortage.

The NSW Teachers Federation has accused the government of failing to act when it was warned seven years ago of looming teacher shortfalls, and has blamed uncompetitive salaries and unsustainable workloads for deterring candidates while driving existing teachers out of the profession. The issue of shortages and future strike action will be discussed at the union’s annual conference this weekend.

Opposition education spokeswoman Prue Car said it was clear the recruitment program would not fix the current shortages, “or reverse the decline in education outcomes that has occurred under 12 years of the current government”.

Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said the government had bolstered the teaching workforce by 15 per cent with almost 10,000 additional teachers in the past decade.

The overseas recruitment program was the longer-term component of the broader Teacher Supply Strategy, with the other shorter-term initiatives “oversubscribed” and delivering more than 100 teachers by the end of the year.

“This is on top of the 7000 teachers already being hired this year,” Ms Mitchell said.

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