Thursday, 8 February 2024

Teacher workforce

Jess WILSON (Kew) (17:23): (517) My adjournment is for the Minister for Education, and the action I am seeking is that the minister release the 2022 and the 2023 teacher supply and demand reports. As of today, there are 1394 unfilled teacher jobs in Victorian public schools. Remarkably, the number of vacancies has increased by the day since the start of the school year last week. Every single one of these 1394 unfilled positions is making life harder for teachers and students right across the state, and we know that these vacancies are hitting regional and rural communities the hardest as well as schools in Melbourne’s growth suburbs.

The teacher supply and demand reports are critical to workforce planning and ensuring the needs of students can be met now and over the coming years, and there is no reason why the government keeps these documents hidden, except to try to hide the full extent of the teacher crisis across Victoria. We have even had the minister try to blame the Commonwealth government for the delay, despite the fact it is a state-based report about the state education system. But in case you think it is just the coalition that is concerned about this fundamental lack of transparency and accountability, you might be interested to hear the Australian Education Union’s views:

Withholding the release of these teacher supply and demand reports means that Victoria’s educators are being kept in the dark on the actual extent of Victoria’s teacher workforce crisis, and leaves us wondering whether the state government has a plan to invest and address these staffing shortages and increased workloads.

The problem with Labor’s lack of transparency on teacher shortages is that it denies Victorians the ability to measure the success or otherwise of the government’s various workforce initiatives, totalling over a billion dollars over recent years. Without this solid data we are completely in the dark about what, if any, impact the government programs are having. For example, the last teacher supply and demand report said that in 2021 demand was expected to grow by 14.6 per cent while the total registered workforce was expected to grow by just 7 per cent. This obviously leaves a significant gap that needs to be filled, but now we are completely in the dark about whether that gap between supply and demand has widened or is closing. Further, the 2021 report identified that one in five graduate teachers was leaving the profession in the first five years. Without the release of the updated reports, we do not know if the Labor government has been able to arrest this trend. We can only draw our conclusions about why exactly Labor is so desperate to keep these important data points hidden from public view and from public scrutiny.

Hundreds of thousands of Victorian students returned to the classroom last week, and every single one of them deserves a quality education, and their teachers deserve to work in an environment that is not defined by overwork and burnout due to staff shortages, so once again I call on the Minister for Education to release the 2022 and 2023 reports.