Teach for Logan

First published in the Logan Reporter on 29 August 2014.

One of my top goals as your local federal representative is to ensure that every child in our area has an opportunity to succeed at school. Good teachers play a vital role in this.

We have some truly excellent teachers in our community, including Raquel O'Connor, the principal of Mabel Park State High School.

But as she said to a symposium of government representatives, teachers and education experts recently, attracting and retaining excellent teachers in Logan is becoming increasingly hard.

There's a few factors at play here - an increasing number of short-term contracts, a lack of flexibility in job choice for teachers and some negative perceptions of our local area, which a lot of good people are trying to change.

I met last week with the organisers of the National Exceptional Teachers in Disadvantaged Schools program at QUT. They're doing a great job recruiting the best and brightest teaching students in their second year at university, offering training and mentoring to specialise in teaching students in lower socioeconomic status areas.

More than twenty NETDS teachers have been employed or undertaken their prac in Logan schools and they're quickly gaining a reputation for being star teachers in our area. We need more of these.

It should be a mark of pride to teach in our strong and diverse community in Logan, and I'd encourage all aspiring educators to make our community their number one preference when choosing schools.

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