The NSW Teachers Federation is committed to addressing what it believes is one of the greatest challenges facing the NSW public school system.
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And the union is banking on support from the Department of Education to staff every public school throughout NSW with additional appropriately qualified and accredited permanent teachers.
NSWTF senior vice-president Henry Rajendra said efforts to fill permanent and temporary teacher vacancies in rural, remote and other hard-to-staff areas were often hindered by a lack of available applicants.
Mr Rajendra said the major obstacle to a statewide increase in school staffing entitlements and non-school based teacher positions remained the Department's Local Schools, Local Decisions policy.
"Local Schools, Local Decisions has been an abject failure and is in material conflict with any notion perpetuated by the Department of a well-coordinated, structured and supportive public school system," he said.
"It also remains the single greatest threat to teacher permanency and high-quality, high-equity public schooling for all students because it devolves the cost of teacher positions to the school budget with insufficient systemic accountability to guarantee that staffing entitlements are maintained and that teaching and learning remains uncompromised."
Mr Rajendra said the answer was bolstering permanent roles, not more casual teachers.
The union has called on the Department to use the additional Gonski funding set aside for 2019 and the $157 million budgeted for casual reliefs, on boosting permanent teachers.
"Despite lifting the recurrent and permanent funding level for the NSW public school system by $1 billion in 2019, the Department has only added 99 permanent teaching positions above the pre-existing staffing entitlement," he said.
"Add this money to the permanent increases in recurrent funding for our public schools that we achieved through the Gonski and Fair Funding Now! campaigns, and there are millions of dollars available to resolve most, if not all, of the current challenges of staffing the NSW public school system.
"The Department is aware of our concerns and we are hopeful of working together to achieve a positive outcome.
"The provision of qualified permanent teachers - including executive and specialist teachers and the provision of qualified permanent non-school based teachers - remains the surest way of supporting schools to deliver teaching programs that can improve learning outcomes of all students."
A spokesperson for the NSW Department of Education said the Department was undertaking the Staffing Methodology Review; "the first comprehensive review of the way in which we staff schools".
"The aim of this review is to ensure that every NSW government school has the staffing resources needed to improve student outcomes," the spokesperson said.
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