The ACT's best teachers could earn six-figure salaries within three years under an ambitious plan to halt a skills shortage and increase the status of the profession.
ACT Education Minister Andrew Barr will meet senior departmental bureaucrats today to begin implementing incentives for teachers to undertake professional development, teach unpopular classes and move into leadership positions within their schools as part of a $3.8million quality teaching budget commitment.
Mr Barr will hold discussions with University of Canberra over potential scholarships to lure Canberra's best and brightest into a teaching degree.
Mr Barr said yesterday the ACT faced a crisis if nothing was done to increase teacher numbers or to foster a new generation of school leaders given a third of the territory's principals are due to retire in the next five years.
He also said it was clear that cash incentives were required to increase the number of teachers in the shortage areas of maths, science and language, as well as providing bonuses for those who managed classes that were difficult or disadvantaged.
These issues will be the subject of discussion by a panel of national education and management experts who will arrive in the ACT today for a three-day workshop on improving teacher quality and leadership.
Mr Barr said increasing professional standards and increasing salaries went hand in hand when it came to improving the status of teaching.
''I think it is time that our best teachers hit the six-figure mark when it comes to pay,'' he said.
''I believe, in the case of our best teachers and the contribution they make, that earning $100,000 is only fair.''
Beginning teachers in the ACT currently earn about $52,000, rising to about $75,000 for teachers with 10 or more years of experience.
Mr Barr said a six-figure salary could be achieved through a combination of ACT Government and Commonwealth bonuses for teaching excellence. The ACT Government will begin negotiating a new pay deal for teachers in January, ahead of the current enterprise bargaining agreement which runs out next June.
A new wage rise comparable to the last 12 per cent three-year deal would boost salaries and Mr Barr said the agreement was likely to include incentives for professional development.
Federal Labor has also flagged bonuses of up to $10,000 for the best teachers in the states and territories.
The Ministerial Council for Education, Training and Youth Affairs is conducting a review of pre-service education and teacher preparation; incentives to address inadequate supply of teachers in specialised areas such as science, maths, language, and difficult students; the quality of entrants to teaching; and rewards, incentives and career structures for existing staff.
The first working group discussing the issue will meet later this month.
Mr Barr said the ACT would not be the only jurisdiction pushing the Commonwealth to help fund better qualified teaching workforces.
''We are all facing the same issues, of needing more teachers, needing them to stay in the profession and needing to provide incentives for them to teach in areas of shortage and in disadvantaged schools.''
The ACT's workforce already risked being picked off by other jurisdictions which were aggressively hiring such as Western Australia.
The Australian Education Union's ACT branch secretary, Penny Gilmour, said there was growing recognition that teachers deserved more money.
''Even the Business Council recently reported the need to pay teachers six figures, so to have the Business Council and the union singing from the same hymn sheet means a lot.''
Teachers had been sceptical about performance pay in the past because it had been tied by the Coalition government to the results of student literacy and numeracy test scores.
''We definitely support a performance pay scheme which is regulated by the achievement of externally measured standards ... and we would not want quotas included,'' Ms Gilmour said.
She noted no OECD country had trained a sufficient number of teachers to replace its ageing workforce and Australia needed to get serious about the problem.
''In the ACT in particular, we risk our workforce being picked off by other states and our superannuation regime also compounds the problem by encouraging early retirement.''
Many teachers were burnt out and were not offering themselves for contract or relief work which added further pressure to the system.