Deputy principals ordered to teach in classrooms to fill crippling teacher shortage

Just months after pocketing a $9000 pay rise, senior backroom teachers have been ordered back into classrooms to fix crippling shortages.

Prue Car, NSW Minister for Education and Early Learning. Picture: NCA Newswire /Gaye Gerard

Senior backroom teachers and deputy principals will be forced back into classrooms to teach students when school resumes next year in Australia’s biggest schooling system in NSW.

The 2500 “executive teachers’’ in school office roles – who recently pocketed a $9000 pay rise – were sent back to the classroom coalface on Thursday by NSW Deputy Premier and Education Minister Prue Car.

A crippling teacher shortage forced the merger or cancellation of 10,000 classes in NSW public schools every day in ­Oct­ober, resulting in some 250,000 students missing out on lessons from their usual teacher.

Ms Car said a NSW Education Department review had found two thirds of the highest-paid executive teachers were not teaching any timetabled classes.

The rest were teaching fewer hours than required under the industrial award.

“At a time when we have 10,000 lessons a day without a casual teacher, freeing up our leading teachers to do the work only they can do by taking more classes is vital to improving student outcomes,’’ she said.

“Executive teachers have a vital role to play in our schools. Their experience, leadership and support for students is unquestioned.’’

Ms Car said that bringing deputy principals and executive teachers back into classrooms part-time could add the equivalent of 500 teaching positions.

In a move that could set a precedent for other states and territories, executive teachers in an average school will be expected to teach at least one day a week when classes resume next year.

Deputy principals will be expected to work 2½ days a week teaching students. Head teachers and assistant principals will have to teach in classrooms four days a week.

Schools that have already set their timetables for 2024 will be given the full year to bring in the changes.

The controversial back-to-class edict will require the Education Department to find more administrative and support staff to do the work previously carried out by executive teachers.

NSW teachers recently won an 8 per cent pay rise, pushing pay rates from $113,000 to $122,000 this year for the most senior teachers. Wages for beginner teachers rose 12 per cent, from $75,791 to $85,000.

The NSW government’s decision follows a warning from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that half Australia’s teenagers failed to meet baseline standards for mathematics while 43 per cent fell below the expected standard for reading by the age of 15, in global testing last year.

It found 15-year-olds are now performing, on average, at the level expected of a 14-year-old teenager 20 years ago.

A chronic shortage of teachers nationally was revealed in the OECD’s survey of Australian school principals.

“In 2022, 61 per cent of students in Australia were in schools whose principal reported that the school’s capacity to provide instruction is hindered by a lack of teaching staff,’’ the OECD report states.

It found that 27 per cent of students were taught by teachers who principals regarded as “inadequate or poorly qualified’’.

A spokesman for Ms Car said schools would be guided to “redeploy work to administrative and support staff that need not be done by a qualified teacher’’.