Australian students shun education degrees as fears grow over ‘unprecedented’ teacher shortage
Australian students shun education degrees as fears grow over ‘unprecedented’ teacher shortage
University application first preferences dropped almost 20% this year, compared with 2023
I don't blame them but fuck this is scary.
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Stressful training and work environment, long hours, and the pay isn't that great either. This really is the government's problem to solve - and it's probably not going to be solved just by paying people once to complete their degree, it will have to be throughout their career by providing more pay and more support. Which of course means the public will eventually end up footing at least some of the bill - but the alternative, where education is compromised, will end up costing even more.
We shouldn't concede that the public has to pay more to fix this problem. We just need to pressure our government representatives to prioritise funding for education above that of other areas.
The average teacher makes $84,810 per year.
It is estimated that there are 307,041 full time teachers.
This equates to a full teacher salary budget of $26B. We know that education is managed at the state level, but let's just experiment with a scenario whereby the federal government decides to provide a funding boost to salaries. Giving all teachers a 25% pay rise would cost $6.5B per year.
How much was the 2023 budget surplus just recently announced by the government? $22B.
So, the government could have covered a 25% pay increase to all teachers in Australia, using a third of the surplus that they realised in this year's budget.Ok, that's for one year, but what about future years, you might ask...
Well, how about we take some of the funding from the scrapping of Stage 3 tax cuts. The Parliamentary Budget Office estimates that the cost of the Stage 3 tax cuts will be $313B over a decade ($31.3B per year). Those tax cuts could even be watered down so that they don't impact lower incomes. The top 20% of income earners in the country receive 73% of the benefit from those tax cuts.
Let's only have tax cuts for the bottom 80% of income earners. That would still give us $22.8B per year in extra budget that we allocate to education. It's that simple.We are already seeing the result of this. This is the result of this.
I don’t want to disrespect teachers, but the really skilful teachers, with innate people-management skills ended up in the private sector, in high paying people-management roles.
This resulted in only the truly passionate teachers staying on the industry. These passionate teachers were easy pray for manipulative, trouble-making students, which forced more and more teachers out of the industry.
This has been a negative-feedback loop over the last 40 years. The only way to resolve the this is to (strategically) pump money into pulling people out of the private sector and back into teaching.
I am sure that there are thousands of people in middle management roles who would love to take on a teaching (or educational management) role with KPIs based on benefit to society, rather than benefit to the pay packet of the next manager up the org chart, as long as they had a decent wage.