This is a step forward but, of course, a plan to have a plan is not an answer to the problem in itself.

And that problem is clearly complex. It would be easy to say that teacher shortages are simply a matter of money. And clearly more money is better than less money - but education may be more intricate than that.

COVID has clearly exacerbated staff shortages. No organisation can function smoothly if staff are taken out of the system at virtually immediate notice.

But it is not clear that just paying teachers more is a cure-all. Teachers are not the worst paid professionals. At the moment, for example, the ACT is advertising for casual teaching staff at salaries of between $72,511 and $114,624 a year.

According to two academics, the starting full-time salary for a classroom teacher in most Australian states was "reasonably competitive with the starting salary of a graduate with an engineering, commerce, or law degree".

The problem is that the structure of pay may not be right.

As the two academics, Jonathan Nolan and Julie Sonnemann, put it: "The trouble is that teacher pay doesn't rise much with age or expertise. The pay scale for a classroom teacher stops rising after about nine years, while the incomes of their university educated peers in other professions keep rising well into their 30s and 40s."

This means that if the new federal government does provide more money, that money needs to be carefully targeted.

But pay is not the only problem. Teachers tell us that they leave the profession because they get burned out by the weight of work, not just in the classroom, but in the staff office afterwards as administrative tasks are heaped upon them.

The education minister had heard harrowing accounts from teachers of 70-hour working weeks. He outlined the problem: classrooms were growing but fewer teachers were there to run them.

"You have more and more kids going to school," he said. "At the same time we have seen a drop of 16 per cent of young students going into teacher training."

Mr Clare has some ideas. He would look at getting more teachers by offering teaching apprenticeships. Ministers would consider paid internships for final-year teaching students. There might be shorter, one-year education diplomas. The rules on work visas for international students could be changed to get more of them into the classroom.

And Mr Clare did seem to agree that the structure of teachers' pay needs to be addressed.

"The pay that teachers get when they start is pretty competitive, then it goes up in grades for about 10 years, and then it tops out," he said. "After 10 years, if you're looking for a pay rise you either have to leave the classroom to become an assistant principal or you leave teaching altogether.

"So we're losing some of these great teachers."

Which brings us back to money.

Teachers often say they feel undervalued, by which they don't mean in strict monetary terms. Making someone feel valued is a complex process. It's about praise and easing workloads as well as money.

But pay does help - employees see it as a measure of how much an employer values them. But teachers are paid by the taxpayer. The government has some tough choices to make.\