Dubbo teacher from St John's College says staff are 'breaking'

"I've been teaching for many years and I've just found the last couple of years has been especially hard on all of us as a staff," said Louise Hughes, a teacher at St Johns Senior College Dubbo and Central West representative to the Independent Education Union.

"It's a pretty sad thing when we've got exasperated teachers saying 'we've only got eight days of school left, thank God. It's tough at the moment, and it's not about money, it's about time."

At St John's, the principal and assistant principal are both teaching classes of their own as full-time teachers can't be recruited to fill those positions.

Splitting classes into other classrooms when a substitute teacher cannot be found has also become so common practice the school has had to change their timetables so that classes are blocked together to minimise disruption.

"We might put four English classes on the one hour so that way students aren't missing out on actual content, they're just missing their teacher. Our schools are doing what they can to alleviate it, but it's an extra strain on the teachers," said Ms Hughes.

"Our younger staff are seeing all this extra load on top of their own classes and it just becomes difficult for them, you can see them breaking. Even for us oldies, we're getting broken too."

Ms Hughes said on one particularly bad day, the school was down 29 staff members including teachers and support staff for students with special needs.

"Fortunately one of our year groups was out on work experience so those teachers could cover. But still, that's a lot of teachers out in one day," she said.

Last week, data attained through questions on notice to the parliamentary inquiry into teacher shortages revealed 19.7 percent of education grads were not working in a classroom in the year after they graduated.

The data showed of the 7,174 people who graduated from education qualifications in NSW last year, 3,973 are now employed in Government schools and 1,783 graduates now work in non-Government schools. 1,418 graduates - or 19.7 percent - could not be accounted for.

In the same year NSW lost 10,918 experienced teachers and one in nine early career teachers left the profession within five years of commencing - a situation NSW Shadow Minister for Education, Prue Car, said was a result of the government failure.

"So we're not recruiting enough teachers, we're not doing enough to keep them in our classrooms, and they're leaving in droves," she said.

"What is the impact of the teacher shortage on our children? Parents know. Every day our children are coming home telling us 'I had a PE teacher for maths', 'I had an English teacher for science', 'I was on the playground with 200 other kids instead of being in class'."

Ms Hughes said she wasn't surprised to hear so many teaching students never made it to the classroom after graduation and said disruption and stressful environments during practicum can be off putting to young, aspiring teachers.

"I feel that's half the reason why these graduates aren't teaching. They can see the staffing situation and how stressful it is," she said.

"We have two young people on our staff who have just finished their final practicum and we've held onto them already. Our school has allowed them to have their own classes - that's what we've got to do. It's the only way we can get people."

While Ms Hughes - who has been a teacher for more than 40 years - loves her job and thinks St Johns is a fantastic school, she said the current crisis leaves her almost ready to "pull the pin" on being a full-time teacher.

And she's not alone - a survey conducted as part of the parliamentary inquiry into the teacher shortage revealed 60 percent of teachers were considering stepping away from the classroom in the next five years.

"The holidays couldn't have come quick enough for a lot of us, we were crying out for a break, just a break," she said.

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