La Trobe Uni expands Nexus teacher training program to NSW

La Trobe University’s Nexus program, which gives mid-career professionals a fast-track into teaching, is expanding into NSW from its Victorian base.

Elliott Child, a La Trobe University Nexus graduate who is teaching at Wodonga Senior Secondary College in Victoria.

La Trobe University’s admired Nexus program, which gives a route for mid-career professionals to fast-track their way into teaching, is to expand into NSW from its Victorian base.

About 35 people will start the two-year program in NSW this month, being supported with mentoring and paid a stipend while they complete a master of education degree and get hands-on teaching experience in a primary school.

The Nexus program was started in 2020 by La Trobe’s School of Education with a focus on hard-to-staff high schools in Victoria. It now works with 109 schools in low socio-economic areas, including primary schools, and 74 of the schools are in regional or rural areas.

In NSW Nexus will be placing trainee teachers into primary schools in both the public and Catholic systems.

“By expanding into NSW primary schools, we are helping to ensure that every student in NSW and Victoria has equitable access to quality education, regardless of their background or location,” said La Trobe vice-chancellor Theo Farrell.

So far Nexus has graduated 120 high school teachers in Victoria and 94 per cent of them continued to teach after completion. The overwhelming majority of graduates (84 per cent) are teaching in schools in the lower half of the socio-economic scale.

Professionals who have switched their career to teaching through Nexus include engineers, pharmacists, mathematicians, health workers, journalists and marketers.

The program is expanding in Victoria and currently there are 51 trainee teachers in the Nexus high school program and 70 in the primary school program which started this year.

La Trobe University’s education dean, Joanna Barbousas, said all of the university’s teaching degrees were about evidence-informed teaching practices that worked in the classroom, and this approach was used in Nexus.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said the Nexus program was one of the things which the government was investing in to deal with the teacher shortage across the country.

He said it was part of the government’s High Achieving Teachers Program which “aims to promote employment-based pathways into teaching so we can get high quality teachers into the classroom faster”.

Nexus graduate Elliott Child started the program in 2021, doing his master in teaching while working at Wodonga Senior Secondary College in Victoria, initially as a teacher’s aide and then, in his second year, teaching classes to gain experience as a “paraprofessional” before graduating as a fully qualified teacher.

Dr Child, who has a PhD in geography, said he switched from his planned career in academia to become a teacher. After graduation he stayed at Wodonga Senior Secondary College as a humanities teacher and now, less than two years after qualifying, he is a leading teacher whose role is to model best practice and implement school wide improvements.

He said he was mentored when he was a Nexus student and is now a mentor to other Nexus students who are assigned to schools in the area.

He said the Nexus program, which gradually increases trainee teachers’ classroom responsibilities while they study for their master of teaching, was intense but well structured.

“It works because you’re not just thrown in the deep end. There’s quite a deliberate and planned mentoring structure around you,” Dr Child said.

Earlier this year Nexus was the judge-selected winner of the Universities Australia Shaping Australia Award in the Future Builder category for excellence in university teaching.