She also chatted with former GSSC student and college captain Bethany Gray, who has just started her teaching career in the region following her involvement in different programs to prepare her for the transition.
Here’s an excerpt from that episode.
Nicola: Barbara, could you paint a bit of a picture of what the teaching landscape has looked like for schools like GSSC over the past couple of years?
Barbara: Since COVID mainly, when we were returning back on site after remote learning, we found that we were experiencing a teacher shortage, and we know that it wasn't just GSSC, it was statewide, in fact, nationally.
But we were impacted on it being a rural school and a large school so we required a significant number of staff to operate the school and what we found is that we had shortages in areas that we probably never had before.
But we also were experiencing teachers who had not returned after COVID because they were at retirement age and felt, well, now it's time to go, or they had transferred to another town or city in Victoria or interstate.
For us, it was around, ‘okay, we've got this shortage, what are we going to do?’
So the department was excellent in providing us with lots of different options that we could navigate through, and some of those we definitely used.
Nicola: Some of the staff that you have hired through these programs, what does that look like?
Barbara: So for the Teacher Financial Incentive Program in the first year that we advertised using that initiative, the take-up was pretty slow.
But in the second year, we were able to appoint about eight new teachers through the incentive.
Having said that, they’re all experienced teachers, and they’ve come in and hit the ground running and have really added to our college.
Then there’s the Teach for Australia and the Teach Today and Teach Tomorrow Program, which is through La Trobe University and Melbourne University.
We’ve picked up some fantastic staff through those programs and these are people just coming into teaching who have had previous experience in industry or previous degrees, and they’re coming in and starting off in their teaching at GSSC.
I can’t speak highly enough of how fantastic those people are, and I think one of the really good things about the Nexus Program, which is part of the Teach Today, Teach Tomorrow Program, is that these are local people, so they know Shepparton really well.
Nicola: Bethany, you’ve come from school and being college captain at GSSC, to going to uni and going through the La Trobe Nexus Program, and now you’re about to teach in a school. How does that feel?
Bethany: It’s definitely a cycle, I can tell you that.
When it comes to things, such as post Year 12, what I was going to do, being able to have connections with La Trobe University and being able to have connections with different programs showed me that I want to do this, but I can stay in Shepparton, which was something that was really interesting to me.
I always sort of knew I wanted to go into education, as my mum worked as an education support while I was in primary school and high school.
I knew it was something I was passionate about, but I did have worries about things like work-life balance, whether I was going to get a job, where I was going to get a job and what teaching was going to look like post COVID.
But all of these programs and incentives, particularly the support, is something that has really shown for a lot of us going from post high school and even students entering as mature age students into university, the prospects of being able to enter a career field that we’re passionate about and now having the level of support to be able to get us there, is phenomenal.
Being able to go from I’m now third year, straight into doing my permission to teach is really exciting because I know I can do it with the support.
Listen to the full podcast here: tinyurl.com/ddteachershortage
