High schools to be forced to hire teachers who have actually studied maths and science

Teachers with no specialist knowledge of maths and science will be prevented from teaching those subjects at high school level, under a new government plan.

The Federal Government says as many as one in five maths at science teachers at year seven to 10 level have not completed even a year of study in those subjects at university level.

Education Minister Simon Birmingham today announced high schools will be forced to hire teachers who have actually studied maths and science at university.

“It really has been a failure in terms of the number of teachers who have been trained with subject specialties in these disciplines,” he told Tom Elliott on 3AW Drive.

“We have had a situation identified repeatedly over a number of years, where too many classrooms have teachers teaching outside their areas of expertise.”

He urged universities to re-instate clear prerequisites that mandate maths and science subjects before entering university.

“It’s just madness that universities are accepting students where they have to then run remedial maths programs, because they do advance or intermediate Year 12 maths,” he said.

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President of the Science Teachers’ Association of Victoria, Soula Bennett told 3AW Mornings it’s a long-standing problem.

“We’ve always had an issue of not having enough physics teachers,” Ms Bennett said.

“It’s the same as specialist maths and maths methods.”

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