The ALP has announced a Teach First program that will encourage professionals to sea-change their careers. Under the scheme doctors, lawyers and artists alike would complete an eight week training course to get back to the classroom and teach.
AEU Federal President Angelo Gavrielatos responded to the program announcement with some incredulity:
“It seems extraordinary that Labor has created a policy designed to recruit people who ‘have been put off by the time it takes to meet qualification hurdles’.
“Every student deserves to be taught by a fully-qualified teacher.
“While we should be looking at ways to get people from other professions into teaching, allowing them to take up a teaching role with only eight weeks training is the wrong approach.
“The skills required to teach children cannot be learned in such a short period of time.
“The focus should be on addressing the things that make it hard to recruit people into teaching and to keep our best teachers in the classroom: high workloads, large class sizes and inadequate career paths,” he said.
