Plans to raise teacher salaries to $130,000 a year to stop sector haemorrhage

Teacher salaries could rise to up to $130,000 a year as Australia battles an increasing shortage in the sector.

The new plan follows a number of strikes in recent months as teachers walked off the job to demand better pay and working conditions.

One recent report suggested that huge numbers of teachers were planning to leave the education sector in the next five years due to the difficult environment.

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Education Ministers from around Australia will meet tomorrow to discuss plans to shore up the sector, including retaining current teachers and attracting new talent.

Among the ideas being flagged are salaries of $130,000 a year, and lowering university fees to make it more affordable to join the profession.

An apprenticeship-style system of on-the-job training is also being mooted.

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NSW Teachers Federation head Angelo Gavrielatos said recently that an entire generation of students were missing out on a proper education because of teaching sector woes.

Every day, he said, thousands of students were reporting that they had their classes merged, forgotten, or cancelled, as schools scrambled to plug teaching gaps.

Gavrielatos said while the pandemic had exacerbated the issue, the teacher crisis predated COVID-19 by years.

He said that teachers had not had their working conditions changed for, in some cases, seventy years.

"The government has got thousands of pages of research and analysis that says the two most important factors here are unsustainable workloads and uncompetitive pay," Gavrielatos said.

"Yet the government appears to be wanting to do everything else other than dealing with the root cause of the issue."

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