How have Australia’s poorest and richest schools ended up being staffed at similar levels? And, in any case, do the advantaged students truly benefit from such close attention? | OPINION by Chris Bonnor
As teacher shortages hit classrooms across the country, the federal education minister, Jason Clare, is meeting his state and territory counterparts on Friday to address the problem. Their challenge is how to find more than 4000 new secondary teachers by 2025.
If Australia’s teachers were more equitably distributed, our teacher-supply problem would be significantly eased. This would be especially so in NSW, Victoria and Western Australia. Public schools and some Catholic schools are being starved of teachers while, in number terms, wealthier independent schools have a surplus.
If independent schools were staffed at the same level as government schools, they would have required about 32,000 teachers. But they employed about 40,000 – 25 per cent more than would have been needed if the same staffing standards had been applied to them as applied in public schools and, for the most part, in Catholic systems. At an average salary of about $80,000, those 8000 additional teachers would have cost more than $500 million.
Their public funding – and results – might be at similar levels, but the regulations around staffing are anything but. The higher up the ICSEA scale, the greater the disparity between the private sector, both independent and Catholic, and the public sector in the number of teachers compared with students.
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