Wednesday, 29 November 2023

Statements on parliamentary committee reports

Public Accounts and Estimates Committee

Report on the 2023–24 Budget Estimates

Jess WILSON (Kew) (10:09): I am pleased to make a contribution on the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee (PAEC) report on the 2023–24 budget estimates tabled on 3 October this year. In my contribution today I would like to make some observations about some of the findings and recommendations relating to my portfolios of education and early childhood in this report. The report specifically called out the significant challenges being faced in Victoria when it comes to teacher shortages. Indeed this is an issue right across Australia, but we are seeing here in Victoria the acute situation of many schools not being able to fill teacher roles. It is particularly a problem in regional Victoria, where there are some schools that are on the precipice of not being able to be open next year given the lack of teachers able to fill those positions.

The government has claimed that it has a foolproof plan to ensure that there will be sufficient teaching staff available to meet demand in this state over the coming years, but when I checked today, just a couple of hours ago, there were over 2500 teacher, principal and learning support worker vacancies right across Victoria. We know how hard it is just from speaking to our local principals and principals right across the state. When they are advertising for teacher roles they get very, very few applications. In fact I was speaking to one principal recently who was advertising for prep teacher roles. Usually he would receive hundreds of applications, and unfortunately he is getting applications in only the 10s and 20s, and the applications are certainly not up to the standards that they might once have been.

I was pleased to see recommendation 17 of the committee, which spoke to the Department of Education enhancing its reporting on how it is meeting teacher workforce supply and demand issues, including creating performance measures related to the funding provided for teacher workforce attraction and retention, and creating and publishing a workforce strategy demonstrating what actions will be taken to meet the demand for government teachers over an appropriate period of time – so putting greater transparency and greater reporting metrics around teacher shortages and what programs and policies the government will actually put in place to increase the supply of teachers over the coming years.

The other issue in the space of teacher shortages is not only getting new teachers into the system but making sure we are retaining our current teachers. The Department of Education publishes the Victorian Teacher Supply and Demand Report. The last version of that was the 2021 version, which was published earlier this year. A recommendation from the report was that the Department of Education update that report and publish the updated report. It would be very timely to do so, particularly as we are seeing the number of teacher vacancies increasing across the state. So we call on the government to publish its updated report, particularly when we look at the fact that the number of graduate teachers leaving the profession from the 2021 report is one in five within the first five years. That is a 20 per cent attrition rate. We need to be able to look at what we can do to actually retain those teachers in the system to ensure that not only are we attracting new teachers in Victoria but we are retaining the current teachers and being able to meet demand right across the state. So we call on the government to update that report and publish a revised update of that report.

Another point in the report handed down a couple of months ago was around the Labor government’s application of payroll tax on non-government schools. This was an issue that was debated heavily at PAEC, and a number of questions were put to the Minister for Education, to the Premier at the time and to department officials. Originally in the budget a $7500 fee threshold was put in place. Clearly the government backflipped on that – I suspect because a number of their own members went to the minister and highlighted the fact that many of their own independent and Catholic schools would be hit by this tax – and lifted that threshold to $15,000. This is a tax that the former minister was not very clear on the application of, backflipping here and there and making different statements within hours of each other. But what is unclear and what this report does highlight is whether or not that $15,000 threshold will be indexed. Because if it is not, then the Parliamentary Budget Office has highlighted that an additional 18 extra schools, at least, will be added to the payroll tax hit list in the coming years, and that is simply unacceptable.