Tuesday, 7 February 2023

Teachers

Matthew BACH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:37): (10) The matter I raise on the adjournment debate tonight is for the Minister for Education in the other place. The minister has very kindly agreed to arrange a briefing for me in my new shadow portfolio. We face a whole series of challenges across our education system. One of them is a very significant teacher shortage. This has come about for a whole range of reasons, but we know there are workforce challenges right across the country. The government has in place a series of measures that are designed to alleviate that challenge, and I do not have a problem with any one of those measures that have been put forward by the minister. The action that I seek – not wishing to divert her time and energy or the time and energy of any of her officials from their important work – is, nonetheless, at that briefing that she has already kindly arranged for me, to understand any analysis that there may have been from the department about the effectiveness of the measures the government has put in place specifically to seek to ensure the best possible outcomes for students regarding their learning and their wellbeing, given the well-known teacher crisis.

As I said, this has been an issue right across the country. Of course we can reprosecute arguments from the past, but I would rather focus now on what we need to do to encourage teachers to come back into the profession. I do agree with the minister that what we need to be doing is seeking to communicate with teachers who have previously left the profession, teachers who have retired, in order to streamline the process to get as many of them back to the classroom as possible.

There has been some discussion, especially in the media over the last couple of days, about inadequate processes that may have led some teachers to return to the classroom without proper checks. I have not wanted to wade into those discussions, because in my view the overwhelming majority of teachers – and I am biased as a former teacher myself, and there are other teachers across the chamber – have the highest regard for student safety. Of course we must have regard for those processes but nonetheless seek to streamline and fast-track processes to get teachers in front of classrooms.

We have got challenges when it comes to the make-up of our curriculum. I think we do need to have a really difficult discussion about teacher quality. The vast majority of our teachers are fantastic. We can have a difficult discussion there, and yet right now I do agree with the very sparing public statements of the minister recently about the primacy of this issue – getting teachers back into the classroom. So I would be very grateful to Minister Blandthorn if she would pass that on to her colleague for me to have at least some understanding of what is being done there and also a further understanding of what we can do on this side of the house to support the minister in her endeavours.