Queensland will have a shortage of more than 1,700 high school teachers within three years, according to federal government modelling which depicts a severe national shortfall in the number of secondary educators.
Documents obtained by Guardian Australia predict Queensland and New South Wales will bear the brunt of that shortfall, with each needing more than 1,700 teachers by 2025.
Teachers and union representatives warned they were facing what one described as the “perfect storm” of booming enrolments, an ageing workforce and a mismatch in the type of educators required compared to those coming out of university.
Even as most states and territories were expected to not have enough secondary teachers, a glut of more than 8,000 primary school teachers was predicted across Australia by 2025.
The modelling – completed by the federal department of education and circulated to state and territory education ministers – shows a 25% decline in Queensland’s high school teaching graduates over a five-year period to 2025. Secondary school enrolments are forecast to rise by 13% in the same period.
But a spokesperson for Queensland education minister, Grace Grace, disputed the predictions.
The spokesperson said the Queensland government statistician’s office figures show enrolments across state schools will increase 4.4% between 2021 and 2026. Modelling by the state government was also said to show there will be enough teachers to meet enrolment growth.
“We made a commitment at the last election to employ 6,190 new teachers and 1,139 new teacher aides over the next four years, and we are on track to meet that commitment,” Grace said.
“This is in addition to the more than 6,000 new teachers we have employed since 2015, as well as more than 1,500 new teacher aides.”
Teachers at public and private schools across Queensland – who wished not to be named as they were not authorised to speak about their work – said they were buckling under increasing workloads.
One department head at a large state school in southeast Queensland said he and his staff were “totally overworked”.
The teacher has almost two decades experience, and said he was now “struggling to get through every day”.
“Teachers are wanting to walk away in droves,” he said. “They are totally over it.”
He said his roughly 10 teachers were struggling with stress and anxiety, swamped under an “immense workload” that was oriented towards “business goals” not “student outcomes”.
“I have young teachers telling me they want to retrain now,” he said.
An English teacher at an all-girls school in Brisbane said pressure on teachers was increasing in the private system as well.
“Very recently, two colleagues of mine have taken stress leave and I’ve not seen that before” she said.
“Both were burned out, had health scares and needed to take time off.”
A study released by the federal government’s Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership in December found a quarter of teachers said they intended to leave the profession before they retired, and more than half of those planned to leave within the next decade.
It found one in three teachers aged under 30 intended to leave over the coming 10 years.
Beyond the south-east, schools, stories have emerged of at least one regional school seconding school administrators to fill a gap in teacher numbers, something one teacher said was “unheard of”.
Queensland Teachers Union president Cresta Richardson said regional schools do “whatever it takes” to ensure continuity of education for their students.
“That is what you do in a school, you get together to ensure the best outcome for your kids,” she said.
But that meant administrators would have to add teaching to their daily workload and somehow “catch up on things that have accumulated throughout the day”.
In the 12 months to last June, more than 30,000 people moved to Queensland from interstate – almost the equivalent to adding a city the size of Gladstone in a year.
“The state government is doing a good job of building schools in the metro growth corridors, but they need to focus on encouraging teachers to outback and more rural areas,” Richardson said.
As well as reducing workloads, teachers say increasing pay and locality allowances would help make the career more desirable.
In all, more than 4,000 extra high school teachers nationwide are needed over the next four years to meet demand, according to federal government modelling.
South Australia is projected to fall more than 1,100 high school teachers short of its needs in 2025, Western Australia will have a dearth of 900 and the Northern Territory be short more than 100 high school teachers. Victoria was forecast to have a surplus of almost 1,000 teachers, Tasmania about 200 more than needed and the ACT was forecast to roughly match its high school teaching requirements.
The Department of Education said the acting federal education minister, Stuart Robert, had “led discussions at education ministers meetings to better understand teacher workforce issues across the country”.
The Queensland education minister said the Palaszczuk government was “always keen to recruit more of the brightest minds to educate our youngest Queenslanders – particularly to remote and regional areas”.
“That’s why we offer incentives including relocation assistance, subsidised housing, and one of the highest graduate starting salaries in the country,” Grace said.
