By Nasik Swami
Many country schools are facing huge challenges in attracting and retaining specialist teachers, says South Australian shadow minister for education John Gardner.
Mr Gardner said the specialist subjects included math, design and technologies, and certain language subjects.
“As we came out of the COVID pandemic, the former Liberal government introduced a Country Education Strategy, which included a range of funded measures particularly designed to increase the flow of graduate teachers successfully settling into country communities, to help them stay longer
and hopefully make their homes in new towns,” he said.
“It remains to be seen whether the new government’s policy mix will prioritise this area successfully.”
To help retain students in country public schools, Mr Gardner has called on the Education Department to ensure that schools provide young people with every opportunity to engage with local businesses and training providers to pursue traineeships and apprenticeships as they come out of school.
He said the department had made some strong strides forwards in recent years in supporting public high schools to successfully engage with local employers, and this needs to remain a priority.
“Young people will make choices about their future that meet the things they want to achieve in life.
“If a student wants to pursue a university pathway that requires that they leave home, then we want to encourage them in pursuing their goal, but we also need to ensure they’ve considered other non- university pathways too, many of which are just as financially rewarding if not more so,” he said.
Mr Gardner said the availability of choice in schooling was a feature of Australia’s education system that many parents have long appreciated.
“The affordability of non-government schooling options is valued by parents for a range of reasons, particularly adherence to faith-based education and family traditions within particular schools.
“Some parents choose different schooling options for their children because of particular speciality programmes or extracurricular activities that some schools offer and others do not.
“The key for our public education system is that if parents are exercising their choice to send their children to a non-government school, it ought to be for one of these positive reasons and not because they don’t have faith in their local public school.”
Mr Gardner said the expectation we must have of our public education system is that whatever town or suburb a family lives in, their child can get a world class education at their local school.
“No system is ever perfect, and every site needs to aspire to continuous improvement, and Naracoorte is no different when it comes to that.
“I would suggest that one factor that influences the number of students who undertake their schooling in other towns is not so much that there is any particular problem with the high school in Naracoorte, but rather that a number of similar-sized towns—larger and smaller—have more non- government school options close at hand.
“No doubt that has informed Sunrise Christian School’s decision to expand their offering into the middle school years.”
