Skilled teachers untapped despite shortage

Hossein Ghaffari has been a school teacher for 15 years with a masters in maths education. But he is barred from teaching in Australian high schools.

The Iranian PhD candidate is one of an unknown quantity of foreign-qualified teachers restricted from working in the country's classrooms despite a nationwide teacher shortage.

"When you're living here and they don't allow you to do what you have done for 15 years, it's a bit disappointing," Mr Ghaffari told AAP.

He currently teaches Victorian Certificate of Education mathematics prerequisites to international students entering university.

Once he earns his doctorate, he will be able to teach in Australia's universities but will still be excluded from appearing before the whiteboard in high-school classrooms.

Monash University researcher and PhD candidate Nashid Nigar believes teachers like Mr Ghaffari represent a missed opportunity when it comes to solving critical classroom shortages.

"It's a repeated kind of rejection and jumping hurdles, meeting all the requirements," Ms Nigar said.

"And once employed, they have to constantly prove that they're on par with the native English-speaking teachers."

Immigrant non-native English-speaking teachers faced lengthy career transition times, discriminatory language requirements and a lack of professional support as barriers to the teaching profession in Australia, Ms Nigar said.

Many qualified teachers migrate successfully to Australia only to be rejected by schools or registration bodies.

"During the settlement time, they engaged in other low-paid and non-skilled jobs in the cleaning sector, driving taxis, working in retail and grocery shops," Ms Nigar said.

Her co-researcher, University of Sydney associate professor Rachel Wilson, said the International English Language Testing System, or IELTS, was a blunt tool in determining teachers' suitability.

"The high IELTS performance required ... would exclude large proportions of the Australian population's native English speakers," she told AAP.

Native English-speaking teachers from Britain, Australasian and North American nations aren't required to take the IELTS test.

Dr Wilson suggested introducing different English level requirements to suit each classroom subject, particularly given the chronic teacher shortage in STEM and other specialist areas.

"If you're going to teach English literature, you're going to have to have very high levels of English proficiency, but if you're going to teach maths, less is required," she said.

Dr Wilson said foreign-qualified teachers could help address Australia's teacher shortage and boost student outcomes.

"In education we know absolutely that diversity of teachers leads through to how students feel about school and therefore how they perform," she said.

Olga Mihli, an English teacher from Russia, landed her first permanent, full-time teaching job more than a decade after securing permanent residency in Australia.

She said high-level IELTS proficiency didn't go far in the classroom and she wasn't prepared for the quirks of Australian English..

"You have to be able to react to their jokes or, when they misbehave, you have to manage their behaviour as well," she told AAP.

"For that you need social English."

Liza Abad successfully registered as a high school teacher from the Philippines to teach high school English in Australia, but she switched to teaching English to overseas students due to a lack of professional support.

"I need to be confident and equipped with what to do in a school setting," she said.

Ms Abad noted the Victorian Institute of Teaching was now offering more support and development courses than when she began teaching in Australia.

"If I had that support when I first came ... I would still be working in that industry," she said.

The federal education department has released its National Teacher Workforce Action Plan, which includes a commitment to prioritise visa processing for qualified teachers and conditional or provisional teacher registration.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare was unavailable for interview, but earlier this month he said inter-governmental education ministers' meetings would build on the plan and review its implementation.

Dr Wilson congratulated the minister's work but added current workforce datasets were insufficient to properly analyse let alone solve the crisis.

The sample size of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership's teacher workforce dataset will almost double to around 33,000 teachers this year, accounting for about 11 per cent of Australia's more than 300,000 full-time equivalent teaching staff.

"If we had effective monitoring of the profession, if we had a proper teacher workforce database, we could have been on this game long before it reached this critical stage," Dr Wilson said.

She added the teacher shortage, both in terms of raw numbers and a lack of specialists, could lead to vicious cycles of declining education systems.

"The moment you start to see declines come through in high school graduates, those feed into university graduates - including initial teacher education students - who then return through to the system."

Dr Wilson said the possibility of filling the gap with qualified migrant teachers offered a huge opportunity.

"We can address the shortages a little bit and we can improve the representativeness of the profession and student outcomes," she said.