World shortage of '18m teachers by 2016'

Primary schools around the world are facing a shortage of 18 million teachers within nine years unless governments invest more in public education, an international education union says. Education International general secretary Fred van Leeuwen delivered the warning in a speech to the Australian Education Union (AEU) conference in Canberra.
Mr van Leeuwen said a new study from the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) had revealed some disturbing statistics. "If our political leaders do not act fast, nine years from now the world will be short of 18 million primary school teachers, 13 million in the low income countries, five million in the industrial economies," he told teachers and education professionals.
Australia will not escape, with the AEU predicting a shortage of 40,000 teachers in Australia by 2010. Mr van Leeuwen said the only way to improve the situation was for the federal government to invest more in public education. Currently, commonwealth expenditure in public education was very low, he said, with the federal government providing just 35 per cent of public school funding, even though 68 per cent of Australian students attend public schools.
"It is apparent that your federal government has become principally a funder of private schools in Australia," he claimed. AEU president Pat Byrne said afterwards that public schools were being denied $2.9 billion from the federal government.
"It is absolutely intolerable in a country as wealthy as this one is, where we see budget surpluses being in fact given back to people in tax cuts over successive years, is not instead putting that money into public education to make sure that children in Australia are not disadvantaged," she told reporters.
Ms Byrne said if governments wanted to hold on to current teachers and attract new ones, they must start respecting them more. "The teacher is important to what goes on in the classroom but that has to be supported by a proper well-resourced system that makes sure that teachers have access to proper professional learning, to proper remuneration, to proper working conditions and in some instances accommodation, for example in rural areas."
Meanwhile, Ms Byrne confirmed reports that there was a serious shortage of maths and science teachers for secondary schools in Australia. The annual report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) ranks Australia 29th for the quality of its maths and science teachings and 12th for the quality of its educational system.
Ms Byrne said there had been a shortage of the maths and science teachers for many years and that was because the people qualified in those areas chose other jobs. "They choose careers other than teaching because they don't feel that teaching is sufficiently well-rewarded or that in fact they are sufficiently well-treated once they get into the system," she said.
However Mr van Leeuwen said the WEF report survey could not be taken seriously, but did highlight a serious issue in Australia. "In our view this is simply the result of the fact that education funding in this country is far below the average in the OECD," he told reporters.