NSW public school students will have more time learning from the state’s expert teachers from next year as the Minns Labor Government works to rebuild the public education system and lift educational outcomes for hundreds of thousands of students.
Hundreds of deputy principals, assistant principals and head teachers will be resuming teaching in classrooms, following a review.
From next year, teachers in additional deputy principal positions in all but the state’s most complex settings will be expected to teach between 2 and 2.5 days a week, while additional head teachers and assistant principals are expected to be in the classroom 3.5 to 4 days a week.
The move will amount to an estimated extra 237,000 hours taught in the state's public schools every year.
The decision is designed to correct the inequity in teaching time of executive teachers created on ad hoc basis under the Liberals and Nationals’ Local Schools, Local Decisions policy.
Despite 10,000 merged or cancelled classes in NSW public schools each day, the former government created thousands of extra executive teachers, taking them out of the classroom as student outcomes fell.
A Department of Education review into executive teachers last year found 1500 executive teachers were not teaching timetabled classes at all, while a further 2400 were teaching fewer hours than required.
Since coming to office, the NSW Labor Government has tackled head on the teacher shortage crisis it inherited from the former government.
At the beginning of this year teacher vacancies fell by 20 per cent as the Labor government's record pay rise for teachers - delivered last year - plus a range of effective recruitment measures deliver progress.
The Department of Education will continue to work with the NSW Teachers Federation to ensure teaching time, wherever possible for executive teachers across the system, is in line with their industrial agreements.
Deputy Premier and Minister for Education and Early Learning Prue Car said:
"The former Liberal government took some of our most experienced teachers off class at a time when we had a chronic teacher shortage."
"We are correcting that by bringing them back into the classroom where their experience and knowledge is needed the most."
"The historic pay rise delivered to teachers last year as well as our decision to make thousands of teachers permanent members of staff is helping to turn the system around, but our students have been missing out on being taught by some of our expert teachers."
"We have a lot of work to do to improve the declining educational outcomes left by the Liberals and Nationals, and we can't afford to have our teachers with the greatest expertise off class."
