Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Thursday, 26 August 2004) . . Page.. 4308 ..

More work is being done on looking at the balance between educational theory and teaching practice and how we can ensure that when our teachers do graduate, are successfully recruited and do move into the classroom, they are as prepared as they can be on that first day in the classroom to deal with students. I think that that is a very important component of the training that they get. There are some recommendations in this report about that practical component and how it could be expanded.

The committee looked at specific need in areas where there are identified shortages, such as maths, science, information and communication technology, special education, and languages other than English, and recommended that the government consider offering scholarships to undergraduate students in areas of specialised subject shortage so that we would be getting more teaching students in to address the need that we will have in the future.

I think that one of the very important things about this report is that it has been able to identify some of the needs that we will be faced with meeting in the future. One way that we can ensure that we get more teachers into the teaching profession and allow more teachers to stay in the teaching profession is by looking at the profile of teachers and how they are talked about in the community. That was touched upon by the Senate committee report entitled A class act, which indicated that teachers saw their status as low in comparison with that of other professionals with equivalent qualifications and that their status had declined over the past 20 years.

Teachers talked about this decline being linked to a range of things, including salary, career structures, workload, the crowded curriculum, student behaviour, and welfare programs. This evidence was something that we picked up in our inquiry and it echoed quite strongly what the Senate inquiry heard. We think that there is scope for a positive media campaign to remind teachers that we do support them, that we recognise the important work that they do and value it highly, and to let the community know that we do value teachers, that we want to see our teachers supported, well remunerated and actually being able to get on with the job that they do best, which is helping our children grow into the adults that we want them to be.

Another issue that we looked at was the separation rate, which links into the big picture. There has been a lot of focus recently in the debate about the number of teachers in the ACT and whether we are going to be well placed in the future concerning the retirement age of teachers and that bulk of teachers who are looking to retire. The committee heard evidence that many teachers are leaving the teaching profession in their first five years of teaching. Sometimes they come back a few years later, but sometimes they do not.

I think that more work needs to be done with those teachers who are leaving early, to find out why they are leaving early and what we can do to make them stay and to see teaching as a long-term profession, and what we can do to make sure that these trained professionals who have worked with students and young people are comfortable with coming back to the teaching profession. We have put forward a few recommendations in relation to that, especially in relation to the support that new teachers get in mentoring. As has been mentioned, we have recommended that the mentoring program be extended from two years to five years and that we look at why these new teachers are choosing to end their careers and leave the profession for good.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .