The current teacher shortage facing many countries is leading to desperate measures to get teachers in front of classes. A common solution to this problem is to assign teachers to teach subjects or phases of schooling for which they are not qualified – that is, to teach out-of-field (OOF) (Hobbs, 2013; Ingersoll, 2008). Identifying the incidence of OOF teaching and working out how to address it through professional education (PE) and other measures is of vital interest to workforce planning (AITSL, 2021). OOF teaching occurs across all school subjects, with latest indications showing that potentially 40% of mathematics teachers, 36% of humanities teachers, 29% of science teachers and 28% of English teachers are teaching OOF. OOF teaching has been linked to low academic performance of students (Van Overschelde, 2022), teacher attrition (Sharplin, 2014), and poor teacher confidence and sense of belonging (Du Plessis, Carroll & Gillies, 2015), and persists as a significant issue facing the education system (DESE, 2021, 2022). In Australia, a lack of systematic data, particularly in relation to teacher subject specialisations (Weldon, 2016), has enabled governments to ignore the growing trend and acceptance of OOF teaching as a solution to the teacher shortage problem.
To ensure the legitimacy of government investment in building teacher capacity to teach in-field, this project responds to an urgent need to understand factors influencing the pattern of uptake of PE by OOF teachers, including school priorities for OOF teacher learning, how policy contributes to the culture surrounding PE, the roles of stakeholders in the provision and discourses around PE, and system motivations that increase the attractiveness of PE designed to develop in-field capability.
Specifically, the aims of the project are to:
Analyse factors influencing teacher uptake of PE by OOF teachers; and
Model the ecology of an education system that values diverse pathways towards teachers becoming in-field.
