Victoria extends tutors in classrooms, seeks offshore teachers

Small-group tutoring will continue in Victorian classrooms to help students most disadvantaged by remote learning during the pandemic, as the government seeks to recruit international teachers to plug staff shortages.

The Victorian government on Wednesday announced it would spend $258 million putting teaching students, retired teachers, teachers on leave and casual relief teachers into schools next year.

The Victorian government is seeking international teachers to fill gaps in the workforce.Credit:Istock

The tutoring program has put thousands of extra staff in Victorian classrooms, but been hampered by ongoing teacher shortages, with some schools forced to use their tutors to cover classes.

The NSW Auditor-General also found the state’s tutoring program had exacerbated staff shortages.

Asked whether the program had diminished the pool of casual relief teachers, Education Minister Natalie Hutchins said the tutors she had met were mainly women and keen to only work part-time.

“This is a position of choice that many teachers are taking to enter back into the workforce,” she said.

Close to 100,000 school students – about 1 in 10 of the state’s students – were tutored this year at more than 2000 government, Catholic and low-fee independent schools.

Eighty-eight per cent of primary school principals and 75 per cent of secondary school principals reported an improvement in students’ results that they attributed to the program, according to a report by consultant Deloitte cited by the government. The report is yet to be released.

Meanwhile, the state government is launching a recruitment drive to help overseas teachers obtain visas and registration in Victoria, to combat slumping enrolments in teaching courses, unusual numbers of teachers off sick, and the freeze in offshore arrivals during the early period of COVID-19.

The Department of Education and Training will accelerate international recruitments, according to a government tender opened to applications this month.

About $4.5 million will be spent on recruiting up to 100 teachers from overseas to fill hard-to-staff roles, a government spokesperson said. Hard-to-staff roles tend to be in rural or regional areas and in disadvantaged schools.

Andrew Pierpoint, president of the Australian Secondary Principals’ Association, said jurisdictions were reviving their international teaching programs after a freeze during COVID-19 border closures.

“We’ve always drawn on the international pool. Before COVID, it was much more prevalent. Fiji, Ireland, England, they were all major contributions to the international teaching pool [in Australia],” Pierpoint said.

“COVID came along, everything fell away, and now we’re starting up again, with a lens of we’ve got this massive teacher shortage.”

The Victorian government has been trying to recruit 1900 teachers through $779 million in the 2022-23 state budget, to give teachers more time for preparation and marking.

The government’s teaching recruitment drive is to fulfil its controversial new enterprise bargaining agreement with the Australian Education Union, in which teachers will have an hour-and-a-half less teaching time per week in return for a 2 per cent annual pay rise.

The tutoring program, costing $480 million in 2021 and 2022, provides small-group tutoring for students who needed help after long stints of remote learning during the pandemic.

Students who struggled most during the pandemic included those with low-level English skills, or at risk of disengaging from school, and people whose home environment was not conducive to online learning, the government has said.

Hutchins said the tutoring initiative would continue and focus on literacy and numeracy, and ongoing funding of it would be assessed again next year.

“I think it’s important kids get that opportunity to be in a much smaller classroom environment and get that one-on-one attention no matter what their subject issues are,” she said.

Strathmore Secondary College year 10 student Joel Rogers said the tutor learning initiative had been really important in his learning, as well as other students. “I’m happy for everyone who is in the program, not just for my school, but other schools, it’s really helped,” he said.

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