Dean and Head of the School of Education and Professional Studies Professor Donna Pendergast has welcomed the results of new research showing teaching jobs will soon buck the trend of shortages with the biggest oversupply of employment opportunities in Australia by 2022.
Analysis by WithYouWithMe has found the education sector is expected to have an oversupply of a 30,242 jobs nationwide by 2022.That means there could be 13.28 per cent more jobs available than teaching graduates that year.
Professor Donna Pendergast said the availabilities would be across the board, in both primary and secondary school, and particularly across the core areas of English, math and science.
She said it was due to population growth and the generational changeover of the workforce.
“We’ve had lots of people who have been teachers for their whole careers and they are moving out of the workforce,” Professor Pendergast said.
“But it’s also a change in the way the teaching workforce is now operating.”
She said graduates were coming into the workforce, staying four or five years and then leaving.
However, Professor Pendergast said people could look positively to the future of teaching.
“The work around understanding the teacher workforce is really just starting to get some teeth about it, so we can look at that with confidence.”
“(The House of Representatives) identified some of the challenges within the profession and what we might do to address those.
“It is absolutely a moment where we can take stock, use all of this kind of information that we have available to us and do some work around innovating in this particular profession.”
Griffith University hosted the Queensland Creating Futures Summit: a focus on the teaching profession on June 18.
It comes as earlier this year, the Federal Government identified education and training as one of Australia’s top four growth industries.
In Queensland, experienced senior teachers earn a base salary of $97,297 p/a, a head of department earns a base salary of $111,540 p/a, and an executive principal earns a base salary of $170,428 p/a.
Griffith’s School of Education and Professional Studies is among the world’s leading education schools, ranked in the top 150 worldwide and has one of the best graduate success rates in Australia.