Education's Groundhog Day

                                                      Pic courtesy Learners' Edge

No doubt, gentle reader, you've read reports of a teacher shortage, and a meeting held yesterday to address it. Teacher shortages are nothing new, but the current situation is alarming.

The pandemic has brought it to a head, but these issues have been floating around for decades.

I spent four years in the nineties in a job where I was responsible (amongst other things) for recruiting teachers to work with students with disabilities in remote schools in the then North Western Region. Regional office was based in Mount Isa, and the region covered an area twice the size of Victoria and Tasmania combined.

The majority of the schools in the region were small, all were remote, and over two-thirds had majority Aboriginal enrolments. They were challenging environments and recruiting always a challenge. The Statewide Human Resource branch  made concessions to remote regions which helped. These included allowing us to contact newly-graduated teachers first, and offering positions which hopefully would be taken up by the graduates before they were offered something less remote. I was the person making the offers on the phone, and was frequently surprised by the ignorance of the geography of Queensland demonstrated by the graduate teachers.

I remember offering a job at Cloncurry to a young woman who asked - "That's somewhere on the Sunshine Coast, isn't it?". I suggested she consult a map, and her enthusiasm diminished rapidly. She was confusing Cloncurry with Caloundra.

We were successful in attracting graduates who grew up in the region and were familiar with it, but there weren't many of those. There was (and it remains) a remote area scheme based on a system which awarded transfer points to teachers in remote locations. This meant that two or three years' service in a remote school earned a posting to a favourable area, usually coastal South-east.

The upshot was a constant battle to fill positions, and quite obviously, that situation continues, and apparently is now beginning to affect less remote regions. Hence, yesterday's conference.

What I found supremely ironic were the recommendations tabled from the meeting. They include the establishment of paid internships, recruitment of teachers from overseas, and proposals to pay highly accomplished teachers salaries of more than $110000 p.a.

The irony in situation lies in the fact that the first two are resurrections of strategies used when I began working in Special Education in the seventies post Vietnam. I was a beneficiary of the internship strategy in that I was granted a twelve month post graduate programme that provided training in my speciality which was Physical Impairment. These internships were offered in Vision Impairment (which my wife completed), Intellectual Impairment and Hearing Impairment. They offered experienced teachers either six or twelfth month study secondments which up-skilled them and prepared them for leadership positions in their specialities.  

Even the proposals to pay higher salaries to accomplished teachers are not really novel. The Senior Teacher programme that operated in Queensland in the early 2000s was not a great success. This is hardly surprising. Cherry-picking "accomplished" teachers and paying them higher salaries simply doesn't work. Teaching is a collaborative activity, and competition for higher pay essentially kills collaboration. It's way past time that politicians began listening to teachers, rather than looking for political brownie points with silver bullet solutions.

There may actually be a silver bullet. Paying all teachers what they are worth, accomplished or otherwise would be a good start. 

Another silver bullet might be quarantining teachers from data collection, NAPLAN administration and other non-teaching (and unproductive) activity. 

This works in countries such as Finland, where marketplace competition is completely absent.