On an ordinary Tuesday in a demountable classroom on Sydney's western fringe, a Year 9 science class is folded into the room next door, its own teacher's position unfilled and no casual available to cover it. It is not a one-off. When the New South Wales government counted the problem for the first time, in October 2023, it found more than 9,800 lessons a day across the state's public schools going ahead without a teacher qualified to run them — a daily shortfall of over 3,000 casual staff, or 42 per cent of what schools needed that day. In primary schools, four in ten of those uncovered lessons ended the same way: classes merged, children doubled up, supervision stretched thin. That is the texture of a shortage a decade in the making, and it is the reason the Minns government made an unusually large bet on a single lever: pay teachers enough more, and the empty positions would start to fill themselves.
What the government did
Labor won office in March 2023 in the middle of a bitter, multi-year pay dispute between the NSW Teachers Federation and the outgoing Coalition government, which had held public-sector wage rises to 2.5–3 per cent a year since 2011. One of the new government's first acts was to scrap that wage cap for teachers specifically. Within months it had struck a deal lifting the starting salary for a classroom teacher from $75,791 to $85,000 and the top of the scale from $113,042 to $122,100, on a restructured, seven-step scale designed to move teachers through it faster. The deal was formalised in September 2023, after the government said it had found $1.4 billion in budget savings over four years to fund the rise above the standard public-sector increase. The government's own framing was blunt: the deal would take NSW teachers from among the worst-paid in the country to the best-paid. A second phase followed in October 2024, when teachers accepted a further three-year award adding 3 per cent a year plus workload changes — capped after-school meetings, extra planning days and more part-time and job-share options — completing what the government called a four-year rebuild of the profession's pay and conditions.
The other promise: funding to the standard
Separately, in March 2025, NSW signed the Commonwealth's Better and Fairer Schools Agreement, committing the state to lift public-school funding to 100 per cent of the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) — the Gonski-era benchmark for what a school needs to teach its particular mix of students — by 2034, with the Commonwealth's own contribution to that standard rising from 20 to 25 per cent over the same period. Pay and funding, in other words, were run as two separate promises on two very different timelines: one delivered inside a single term of government, the other stretched across a decade and two more state elections.
The strongest case
A profession the state itself had let fall behind
The government's argument for leading with pay is not manufactured after the fact. The independent Gallop inquiry into the NSW teaching profession — commissioned by the previous Coalition government and delivered in February 2021 — had already found a workforce in genuine crisis: escalating workloads, a salary structure that had stopped being competitive against other professions and other states, and, at the start of that school year alone, some 1,250 unfilled permanent teaching positions. A decade of wage caps had left NSW's top classroom salary trailing comparable states even as the job itself grew harder. Faced with that starting point, the Minns government's logic was straightforward: no rostering fix, incentive payment or recruitment campaign was going to out-compete a starting salary that had fallen behind the offers graduates were getting in law, health and finance, so only a decisive, headline salary rise could reopen the pipeline and change how the profession was seen by people choosing a degree. On its own terms, the bet has shown a return. Statewide teacher vacancies fell from a 2022 peak of more than 3,000 to 1,698 by August 2024, and the permanent share of the teaching workforce rose from 64 to 72 per cent over the same period as thousands of temporary staff were converted to ongoing roles. On funding, NSW also reached 75 per cent of the SRS in 2025 — two years ahead of the previous government's own trajectory — and locked in a rising Commonwealth funding floor that no earlier NSW government had secured. Whatever the deal's limits, it was a government choosing to spend political capital on a problem it had inherited rather than managed away with talking points.
The evidence
The primary record shows two different shortages sitting inside the same headline number. The first is a general staffing shortage that pay can plausibly fix, and on the state's own count it has been easing: vacancies statewide are down sharply since the deal was struck, and in regional and rural NSW — traditionally the hardest area to staff — permanent vacancies fell by roughly 47 per cent, or 581 positions (approx.), between 2023 and early 2025, leaving around 654 unfilled roles (approx.) across 1,369 schools. The second is a narrower, structural shortage that a uniform salary rise does not obviously reach: teachers qualified in specific subjects, in specific places. The NSW Auditor-General's 2019 performance audit of STEM teacher supply found the Department of Education could not reliably say what subjects its own teachers were actually teaching, that around 40 per cent of STEM teachers were already over 50 — against 33 per cent in other subjects — and that of more than 530 STEM scholarships offered annually, only 79 per cent were taken up, with around 30 per cent of recipients not completing their service obligation. A follow-up 2023 Auditor-General audit of regional, rural and remote education counted 922 permanent teacher vacancies in the bush as of January that year, and found schools routinely combining classes and rostering teachers outside their trained subject to keep timetables running. Nationally, an out-of-field maths class remains common enough that close to one in four Year 8 students sit with a teacher whose own training was in a different field; the state's STEM audit found that pattern is worse again in inland and remote NSW specifically.
The funding trend runs on the same two-speed pattern. NSW public schools were funded at only around 89 per cent of the SRS in 2024, edging up toward an estimated 90 per cent in 2026 (approx.) — a shortfall tracked independently through the Productivity Commission's Report on Government Services and the state-Commonwealth bilateral funding schedule, not just a government's own press release. That gap sits alongside a longer-running pattern the same data tracks: most non-government schools nationally have for years been funded at or above 100 per cent of their own SRS, while the public system that enrols the larger share of disadvantaged and out-of-area students has not. Full funding for NSW public schools is not due until 2034, and it depends on both the state and Commonwealth governments holding their side of a ten-year schedule neither has fully delivered before.
The critique
That split in the evidence matters because it goes to the central design choice in the pay deal: the rise was uniform, not targeted. Every one of the state's roughly 95,000 public school teachers moved up the same restructured scale, regardless of subject or location, alongside smaller, separate incentive payments — a Rural Teacher Incentive of $20,000 to $30,000 and an Experienced Teacher Benefit of $10,000, both capped and geographically limited — bolted on to do the specific targeting work the base rise does not. That is a defensible way to lift the profession's general standing quickly. It is a weaker answer to the two problems the Auditor-General has spent six years documenting: a STEM and regional shortage that is about which subject and which postcode, not the salary on the cover page, and a department that, on the 2019 audit's own finding, still could not reliably say which of its teachers were teaching outside their trained field — meaning it could not target new money precisely even if it wanted to. This is the merit-versus-need debate in practice: a flat, service-based pay scale rewards years worked over the specific skills or locations the system is short of, while the state's higher, skills-linked accreditation tiers reach only a small share of the workforce. A uniform rise buys general competitiveness. It does not, by itself, buy a maths-qualified teacher for a town four hours from Sydney.
A pay rise changes what a graduate is offered on day one. It does not change what a rural physics class is offered every day after that.
The funding side carries a similar gap between the announcement and the arithmetic. The pay rise that dominates the current spending story was not funded by new revenue; the government's own figures show it required $1.4 billion in budget savings and reprioritisation over four years, on top of the standard public-sector wage increase — meaning the money for higher salaries was found inside an existing budget that was, and still is, short of the resourcing standard the Commonwealth has now agreed a public school needs. A child starting kindergarten in 2026 will finish their entire public schooling before the state's 2034 funding target is due to be honoured. Raising the price of the job and raising the resourcing of the school are two different bills, and on the evidence to date NSW has paid down the first faster than the second.
The risk to the future
A recurring bill, a decade-long promise
The 2023 pay rise is not a one-off cost; it is now the new floor of a workforce nearing 100,000 people, compounding through every future agreement — the October 2024 extension already added a further 3 per cent a year on top of it — inside a budget that has also promised to close the SRS gap by 2034 and to keep pace with enrolment growth concentrated in the same high-growth and regional corridors the Auditor-General has flagged as hardest to staff. If vacancy improvements plateau once the initial catch-up effect of the 2023 rise wears off — and other states and professions adjust their own offers in response — NSW may find itself competing again with less room to move, having already spent its biggest lever. And if the STEM and rural shortages this evidence points to are not closed by separate, targeted measures, because the largest new dollars went into a uniform base rate rather than the specific gaps auditors named, the state risks a two-tier outcome: aggregate vacancy numbers that look solved, sitting alongside disadvantaged and rural schools still running composite classes and out-of-field teachers years after the headline deal was signed, in schools that are still, on the primary record, funded below the standard the state itself has agreed they need. The next test is not whether NSW can announce a big number; it is whether the 2034 funding schedule survives contact with a future budget under pressure, the way the previous government's own SRS timetable did not.