More children and young people are accessing schooling than at any other point in history. This is largely due to the pursuit of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SGD4), which aims to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” In tandem with the millennial development goals, this has contributed to large-scale expansion of school services around the world.
However, this expansion of schooling hasn’t been without its challenges, particularly when it comes to staffing. UNESCO modelling indicates a global shortfall of 44 million teachers by 2030. One of the issues driving these shortages is the distribution of school education workforces, as access to quality, affordable housing prevents sufficiently qualified educators from working in the areas they are most needed.
Australian cities are some of the least affordable in the world. Sydney’s housing affordability crisis is well-documented, with house prices and rents being highest in job-rich inner and middle rings, and high amenity eastern and northern suburbs. Over the last decade, and particularly in the past five years, essential workers have been increasingly leaving these areas due to rising housing costs that are too expensive for early career essential worker salaries. Over 90% of teaching positions in Sydney are in areas where the median rent or sales price is unaffordable on a teacher salary.
Professor Scott Eacott (UNSW and the University of Saskatchewan), analysed this issue in a paper for the International Journal of Education titled, “School provision, workforce distribution, housing, and the staffing of schools: The case of Sydney, Australia”. In it, Professor Eacott developed a novel measure called the Workforce Catchment Area (WFCA) to better assess how workforce distribution affects supply and demand issues for schooling services.
The WFCA utilises large-scale datasets, like those available on the AURIN platform, to provide policymakers with accurate information on workforce distribution that can drive targeted and tailored solutions to teacher shortages.
Using Sydney as its template, the WFCA overcomes the limitations of supply and demand ratios by looking at observed commuting patterns and examining the external influences that affect teachers’ ability to work in the areas in which they are needed, such as housing and transportation costs. It examines population profiles, teacher salaries, commuting flows, school locations, and housing affordability to better understand where educators live and work in Sydney. Professor Eacott used the AURIN platform in this research to access property data from Australian Property Monitors regarding house sales and rental prices.
The WFCA method showed that, despite popular narratives, there is adequate supply to meet Sydney’s schooling demands. Instead, the issue the WFCA highlighted was an unequal workforce distribution caused by rising housing and transportation costs that prevented teachers from working in areas where demand was highest. This has been a missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding the outside-school factors that can attract and retain staff.
It is a vital development when teacher shortages are set to increase in certain areas as Australian populations continue to grow. This is particularly urgent for cities like Sydney, which represents over 58% of the staffing demand in New South Wales.
The WFCA not only provides insights into the problems facing school staffing, it also offers policymakers the comprehensive data needed to deliver effective solutions for workforce redistribution. Creating the conditions most likely to deliver high-quality, equitable, and inclusive education is of paramount importance for government policy makers. Data-driven models, such as the WFCA, are uniquely placed to drive this transformative change that can facilitate education and economic development. Using data from platforms such as AURIN, the WFCA provides insights into past, present, and emerging education, and the economic challenges facing it.
This could be transformative for countries worldwide who are seeking a fast and easy-to-use approach to address staffing shortages in schools in a manner that benefits students, teachers, and their wider community.
