Damning report says department failing ‘actual needs of schools’

The Queensland government does not know how many teachers state schools need, or whether regional and remote school attraction schemes are properly working, an audit report has found.

The report released on Thursday found the Education Department was running a patchy system plagued by large information gaps.

“[The Education Department] lacks the underlying data, analysis, and planning to inform the design of its strategy and some of the related initiatives,” the report read.

An audit report has found the Education Department doesn’t know the exact number of teachers needed in Queensland state schools.Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

“Its strategy and initiatives also lack measurable goals and targets ... [and] there is no central team responsible for monitoring workforce planning activities and delivery.”

The state’s dedicated attraction and retention schemes relied upon job vacancy modelling that would indicate where schools were most in need of staffing, but this model only covered about half of Queensland’s state schools.

Excluded from the model were the majority of schools in urban and coastal regions spanning from the NSW border up to Bundaberg – a total of 54 per cent of schools, 72 per cent of teachers, and 74 per cent of students.

In schools that had their workforces monitored by the department, the state relied on principals to report the number and types of teaching roles needed at their schools.

The audit said some principals were not informed of what it considered adequate staffing levels, meaning the modelling was inaccurate and “not fit-for-purpose”.

“While it provides a short-term projection of teacher needs, this projection does not accurately reflect the actual needs of schools across the state,” the audit read.

Other schools, the audit found, simply stopped reporting long-standing vacancies or staffing shortages.

“This is due to ongoing challenges in meeting known gaps,” the report read.

The reporting systems for job vacancies, which also handle teachers’ transfers, were largely separated into four chunks, which slowed down requests from school staff and information between departmental employees.

The attraction schemes built upon the workforce modelling system, the audit found, had been successful in bringing teachers into the region.

Many teachers entering the regions were first-year graduate teachers, or those still completing final university assessment and undergoing placement.

The Education Department’s attraction and support schemes would pay these graduate teachers about $16,300 on top of their salaries when placed at a remote school, and $6100 at a regional school.

However, the audit said the actual impact of these schemes were not clear – despite the oldest running for almost a decade – because the state had not properly monitored them.

It also found the amount of on-the-ground support for inexperienced teachers in regional and remote schools varied wildly.

The Audit Office put forward seven recommendations, based on expanding data collection, monitoring incentive schemes, and centralising rural and regional offices.

The Education Department agreed to all the recommendations, and said it intended to expand data collection on job vacancies to all schools in the state by March 2026.

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