Staff utilisation

Western Australia’s Butler College has created a culture of continuous learning and development for all of its staff. This long-term, whole-school approach focusses on improving the skills and capacity of all staff (including non-teaching staff) through various means, including action learning projects and peer-to-peer support and coaching.

Three Deakin University academics ­– Dr Linda Hobbs, Associate Professor Coral Campbell and Associate Professor Colleen Vale – recently visited ACER to share their research on out-of-field teaching. In today’s School Improvement podcast, we share some highlights from their presentation.

A new ACER report looks at the extent to which secondary school teachers in Australia are teaching subjects they haven't specialised in during their studies. It includes data on the proportion of Years 7-10 teachers teaching out-of-field in 20 subject areas.

Just over one-quarter of Year 7-10 teachers in Australian schools are teaching out of field, with those at the start of their careers more likely to be teaching a subject they haven’t specialised in.

When you’re planning a lesson or unit of work, one of the things you’ll be thinking about is how to make the best use of the resources available, including teacher aides.

One of the biggest challenges we face in school education is to raise the status of teaching as a career choice, to attract more able people into teaching and to develop teaching as a knowledge-based profession, writes Professor Geoff Masters AO.

Ongoing improvements in educational performance in Australian schools depend on continual improvements in the quality of classroom teaching.

‘We ... entrust and empower people to take on and drive improvement in teaching and learning.’ See how adopting a distributed leadership model can help drive innovation.

Around four out of 10 secondary principals and one in five primary principals say they have difficulties finding suitable staff to fill vacancies, a new survey indicates.

Why might early career teachers consider leaving the profession? What kind of support would encourage them to stay? Find out in the latest episode of The Research Files.