Students commencing teaching degrees in 2024 can now register for scholarships worth up to $40,000 which are designed to encourage more people to become teachers.
The Albanese Government is delivering on its election promise to deliver the $160 million Commonwealth Teaching Scholarships Program.
In designing the scholarships, the Government consulted with school principals and teachers, who spoke about the scholarships they received and how they often included a requirement to teach for a period of time.
Based on this feedback, the scholarships will include a ‘commitment to teach’ requirement, which means recipients must be willing to commit to teach for four years (undergraduate) and two years (postgraduate) in government-run schools or early learning settings.
The 5,000 scholarships will be available for new teaching students studying from 2024 and will be targeted at high-achieving school leavers, mid-career professionals, First Nations peoples, people with disability, people from whom English is an additional language or dialect and individuals from rural, regional and remote locations or from low socio-economic backgrounds.
Scholarships of $40,000 each will be available for undergraduate teaching students over four years and $20,000 for postgraduate students over two years.
To encourage more teachers to live and work in remote Australia, students completing their final year professional experience placements in these communities may receive an additional top-up payment of $2,000.
This also builds on the Government’s program to cut HECS-HELP debt for teachers in very remote areas.
Prospective teaching students can check their eligibility and register their interest at education.gov.au/teaching-scholarships. Applications close on 14 January 2024.
“Teachers do one of the most important jobs in the world, but we don’t have enough of them. I want more young people to leap out of high school and want to become a teacher, rather than a lawyer or a banker,” Commonwealth Minister for Education Jason Clare said.
“And I want more people in the middle of their careers to consider becoming teachers. That’s what these scholarships are all about. Tying scholarships to a commitment to teach is an old school idea that will help tackle today’s teacher workforce challenges.
“They will help 5,000 of the best and brightest teaching students to complete their studies and begin changing lives in the schools who need it most. This is one part of our plan to tackle the teacher workforce shortage and builds on our reforms to teacher training, extra university places for teaching and the ‘Be that teacher’ campaign to elevate the profession.”
