A few years ago, I was invited to a teacher-workforce symposium commissioned by the NSW Department of Education and run, as these things inevitably are, by a large management-consulting firm. Academics involved in teacher education had been assembled to help solve the persistent problem of attracting and retaining teachers. There was the usual discussion of pathways, professional identity, workforce planning and initiatives that could eventually be arranged into a reassuring PowerPoint presentation. At some point, I suggested what seemed to me the most obvious response to a labour shortage: perhaps teachers in schools and subjects that nobody can staff should simply be paid more.
The suggestion was not debated and rejected; it was treated as essentially impossible. A mathematics or physics teacher working in a hard-to-staff school could not simply be paid more than another teacher at the same career stage. Industrial arrangements would not allow it, the union would never accept it, and the salary structure depended on teachers at the same level receiving the same pay. Fair enough, except this was already fiction. The Department was already paying some teachers more when their labour was harder to secure; it just avoided doing so through the salary scale. Rural and remote teachers can receive recruitment bonuses, retention payments, relocation assistance, rental subsidies and incentives worth tens of thousands of dollars. So, the principle was never really in dispute. The Department understands perfectly that scarce labour costs more. What appears unacceptable is saying so publicly and plainly. Differential pay… impossible; recruitment bonuses, incentives and allowances = policy. The market is allowed to operate, as long as nobody admits that it is a market.
The suggestion was not debated and rejected; it was treated as essentially impossible. A mathematics or physics teacher working in a hard-to-staff school could not simply be paid more than another teacher at the same career stage. Industrial arrangements would not allow it, the union would never accept it, and the salary structure depended on teachers at the same level receiving the same pay. This is exactly what one might expect them to say, except scarcity had already forced the Department to do exactly what they were flat-out rejecting, just under a different guise. Rural and remote teachers receive recruitment bonuses, incentives worth tens of thousands of dollars, retention payments, relocation assistance and rental subsidies. The Department understands perfectly that some labour costs more. What appears unacceptable is saying so publicly and plainly. Differential pay…; recruitment bonuses, incentives, and allowances = policy. The market is allowed to operate, as long as nobody admits that it’s a market.
I was reminded of this while writing my last two posts. The first argued that completing a PhD does not entitle somebody to an academic job. The second extended the point: studying law does not entitle you to become a lawyer, and studying history, philosophy or computing does not create an obligation on government to find an occupation bearing the same name. Education gives people an opportunity to compete. It does not guarantee the outcome. Teaching, though, seems to come remarkably close.
That is curious because governments seemingly spend an extraordinary amount of time worrying about the quality of people entering teaching. Initial teacher education has been subjected to repeated reviews, new standards, accreditation requirements and demands that universities demonstrate that their graduates are classroom ready (I wrote about this here and here). Universities are told that we need to recruit better candidates, strengthen courses, improve professional experience and produce graduates with iron-clad evidence that they can teach. And of course this makes sense. Universities should produce good beginning teachers, and graduates shouldn’t be awarded a teaching qualification simply because they have managed to remain enrolled for four years.
But there is a strange asymmetry in the argument. Government demands increasingly sophisticated evidence that universities are producing high-quality graduates, then seems uninterested in distinguishing between those graduates once they reach the employment system. The implicit expectation appears to be that initial teacher education should produce a uniformly excellent product: every graduate properly trained, fully classroom-ready, and sufficiently alike in quality that the employer only needs to establish they are qualified, deem them suitable, and place them on the conveyor belt to a school. The burden is pushed upstream to universities to eliminate as much variation as possible before graduation, rather than accepted downstream as an employment responsibility. That is, to distinguish between people who are all qualified but not equally as good, and to put the strongest teachers where they are most needed.
To be fair, NSW does ‘screen’ applicants. It assesses qualifications and essential requirements before placing teachers on the ‘Approved’ list, and it also requires a teacher-suitability interview, a process it apparently regards as sufficiently important to outsource to a recorded online platform rather than conduct as an actual interview. It also operates a Graduate Recruitment Program that identifies high-performing graduates and gives them priority access to permanent appointments. That means they do distinguish between graduates, but only at the point of graduation, and only for the top tier; everyone else just goes on the list. If this doesn’t make sense to you, trust your gut.
For much of the public-school employment process, once an applicant is approved, other factors take priority: teaching codes, school preferences, transfer categories, service, and priority dates. Under the current procedure, approved applicants who match to a vacancy are usually prioritised by employment priority date, not by a merit system, where the best teachers for that school are placed. Merit-based pathways do exist, but these are exceptions and are not the organising principle of the system.
That is the part I find difficult to reconcile with the relentless attention given to initial teacher education. A qualification simply tells us that somebody has met the threshold for entry to a profession. It does not tell us that all graduates who have crossed that threshold are equally good. Qualified and suitable does not mean good; good does not mean excellent. Universities certainly have a responsibility to ensure that their graduates meet the professional standard expected of beginning teachers. But expecting universities to remove all meaningful variation between graduates is both impossible and conceptually strange. We do not expect law schools to produce graduates of identical quality and then appoint solicitors according to the date they joined a queue. We qualify people, and then employers decide whom they want, even in the public sector.
The clue is in the name: initial teacher education. A graduate should be capable of beginning the work of teaching, not emerge as a finished professional whose future quality has already been determined by their university course. Expertise develops through practice, mentoring, feedback, experience and professional learning. Some beginning teachers will become exceptional very quickly. Others will be competent. Some will struggle. And some, let’s be honest, will not be good at all. If government genuinely believes teacher quality matters, its responsibility cannot end by demanding that universities send better graduates through the front door.
This raises the second problem. Once teachers are employed, how effectively does the system build a record of who is actually good at the job? Teachers complete annual performance and development processes, but this is like putting lipstick on a pig. The NSW Audit Office found that the Department did not effectively monitor teaching quality across the state and that its performance framework did not adequately support principals and supervisors to manage and improve teacher performance. The most prominent figure in the report was that, in 2018, only 53 of more than 66,000 teachers were formally identified as underperforming or unsatisfactory. Really? Just 0.08 per cent? Perhaps NSW had somehow assembled a workforce where more than 99.9 per cent of teachers were performing satisfactorily, a level of professional competence unknown in any other comparable sector of its size. The Audit Office, and anyone else with an iota of common sense, was less convinced of the numbers and found that the system was not structured to reliably identify underperformance, and that fewer than half of surveyed teachers thought their managers dealt appropriately with poor performance. The more reasonable explanation: the system is not designed to make distinctions about teacher quality.
And the distinction works in both directions. This is not an argument about identifying bad teachers and removing them. It is about identifying excellent teachers and allowing excellence to matter. A teacher who has demonstrated exceptional practice over several years should have something more professionally meaningful to show for it than having accumulated another year of service. A convincing appraisal system should create a record that can inform future appointments. Without that, we fall back on the things that are easiest to count: dates, codes, years and points.
Transfer arrangements illustrate the issue. There is a perfectly legitimate case for recognising teachers who work in difficult schools. Someone who moves away from family, accepts challenging conditions and serves in a school that others are reluctant to staff should receive recognition and a credible pathway to a more favourable appointment. But service and merit are not the same thing. Working successfully for several years in a difficult school should make somebody a preferred candidate for a desirable appointment, not guarantee it. Completing the required period at a hard-to-staff school might reasonably guarantee an interview, serious consideration, or even some kind of weighting. It should not make comparative merit disappear.
This is where the pay argument from that symposium comes back into focus. Scarcity and merit are also different things. A brilliant drama teacher may be a far better teacher than a mediocre physics teacher, while the physics teacher may nevertheless be harder to recruit. One is a question of professional quality; the other is a question of labour supply. A sensible system should be capable of holding both ideas at once. Pay more when a particular skill or location is genuinely scarce, and select the strongest available teacher when deciding whom to appoint. NSW already acknowledges the first through its elaborate collection of incentives. What it seems much more reluctant to do is to acknowledge the second.
None of this requires abandoning a statewide public system or giving principals unchecked freedom to hire whomever they like. Central staffing serves legitimate purposes. Transfer rights matter. Schools in difficult locations cannot simply be left to fend for themselves in a completely free labour market, and selection processes need safeguards against favouritism and discrimination. But safeguards against poor judgment should improve judgment, not replace it. Common criteria, properly constituted panels, evidence of teaching performance and reviewable decisions are features of professional recruitment. Administrative objectivity is valuable, but a priority date is not a measure of teaching quality simply because it is easy to defend.
The broader point here is about responsibility. Governments repeatedly tell universities that teacher quality begins with initial teacher education. Of course it does. But it shouldn’t end there. Universities should be held accountable for preparing graduates who are genuinely ready to begin teaching. The Department should then be equally accountable for identifying which graduates are strongest, developing them once employed, distinguishing excellent from satisfactory performance, and ensuring that merit carries weight when jobs are allocated.
A teaching degree should operate like any other professional qualification. It should give a graduate the right to compete for employment, not an entitlement to it. Being qualified and deemed suitable should get someone through the gate. What happens after that should depend, substantially, on how good they are.
For all the rhetoric about teacher quality, you would think identifying the best teachers might feature somewhere in the system. Parents are not sending their children to school hoping the Department has found somebody who satisfied the minimum requirements, matched the appropriate codes and had the right number beside their name. They expect the system to try to put the best teachers it can find in front of their kids.
Universities cannot manufacture a workforce in which every graduate is equally excellent. Nor should the Department need us to. Its job is to discern the difference.
