At a primary school in Melbourne's outer west, the Grade 4 class that started 2025 went without a permanent teacher for most of first term, taught instead by a rotating list of casual relief teachers — one for a single day, one for three weeks before moving on to a school offering a rural incentive payment. It is an ordinary story rather than an exceptional one: a 2025 survey of more than 8,000 Victorian public school staff, commissioned by the Australian Education Union and conducted with Monash University, found 73 per cent of principals had experienced a staff shortage in the previous year and 61 per cent had an unfilled position on the day they answered. A short drive away, the same gap shows up on a hospital roster, where a shift is covered by a nurse pulled from another ward because no one else is available. Victoria has spent well over a billion dollars trying to close both gaps since 2022 — free university degrees, a legislated nurse-to-patient ratio, cash incentives to move to the country, and in May 2026 the country's largest teacher pay rise — and its own workforce data show the shortage narrowing in some places and widening in others.
What the government did
Two Labor governments — Andrews, then Allan since December 2023 — built a layered response to workforce shortages in schools and hospitals, mostly through a sequence of budget packages rather than one reform. On health, Victoria legislated the world's second nurse-to-patient ratio law in December 2015, turning a provision first won in a 2000 enterprise agreement into statute; a further Safe Patient Care Ratios Amendment Act, assented to in April 2025, is lifting ratios in intensive care and emergency resuscitation bays in three stages — 25 per cent of the change from Royal Assent, 75 per cent from 1 December 2025, and 100 per cent from 1 July 2026 — tied to a 2022 election promise of 457 additional nursing and midwifery full-time-equivalent positions. Alongside the law, the government negotiated a new Nurses and Midwives (Victorian Public Sector) Enterprise Agreement, approved by the Fair Work Commission on 8 November 2024 and running to April 2028, delivering a 28.4 per cent compounded pay rise and more than 70 new or improved conditions. In 2023 it also launched a $270 million scholarship scheme making nursing and midwifery degrees free for more than 10,000 students, and an international recruitment campaign that has brought over 1,200 doctors, nurses, midwives and allied health workers from the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Ireland, Hong Kong and Sri Lanka into 40 Victorian health services. On education, the government made undergraduate and postgraduate teaching degrees free from September 2023 under a $229.8 million package meant to support around 4,000 future teachers a year, provided they then work in a Victorian government school for two years. It layered a Targeted Financial Incentives scheme worth up to $50,000 (before tax) on top of that, to attract teachers into hard-to-staff rural and regional schools, at a cost of about $27 million in the 2024–25 financial year (approx.). And after the Victorian Government Schools Agreement lapsed at the end of 2025 and a 35,000-strong rally in Melbourne in March 2026 became the first major teacher industrial action in thirteen years, the government reached an in-principle deal on 15 May 2026 worth $4.6 billion, lifting teacher and principal pay by between 28.3 and 32.4 per cent over four years — a package it has publicly billed as making Victorian teachers the best-paid in the country.
The strongest case
A world-leading ratio law, a fee-free training pipeline, and now the best teacher pay in the country
The government's fairest defence starts with what it inherited and what it built on top of it. Nurse-to-patient ratios were not Victoria's invention — nurses themselves won them in a 2000 enterprise agreement — but the Andrews government put them into statute in December 2015, making Victoria only the second place in the world, after California, to guarantee minimum staffing by law rather than by a contract that can be renegotiated away. The 2025 amendment extends the same principle into intensive care and emergency resuscitation bays on a staged, publicly dated timetable running to July 2026, tied to a costed election commitment of 457 extra nursing and midwifery positions. The $270 million scholarship scheme removed a real financial barrier: more than 10,000 nursing and midwifery students have had tuition covered since 2023, and the Department of Health's own data show 7,664 new frontline health roles were filled in the year to June 2024, a 6.7 per cent jump on the year before. On education, more than 14,000 additional teachers have registered to teach in Victoria since 2020, and the Department of Education's 2024 workforce modelling projects a smaller 2030 shortfall in secondary and primary teachers than the 2029 shortfall its 2023 modelling projected a year earlier — evidence, on the government's telling, that the free-degree scheme and the rural incentive payments are working as intended, with roughly 90 per cent of incentive recipients still working in the government system (approx.). And in May 2026 Victoria became the first state to promise teachers the best pay in the country, a $4.6 billion commitment the government says will put more than 90,000 full-time teachers over $1,000 a month better off this year. A government that had done nothing would not have a ratio law, a fee-free training pipeline, or the country's highest teacher pay on the table — this one has all three.
The evidence
Set against that steelman, the state's own numbers show the gap has not closed — on some measures it has widened even as spending has grown. In schools, department data tabled in response to parliamentary questions show more than 1,100 vacancies remained open across Victorian government schools as at December 2025 (approx.), including more than 900 teaching and education-support roles, more than 50 unfilled learning-specialist positions and 44 vacant principal or assistant-principal roles. The reliance on casual staff to plug permanent gaps is itself now a large and growing budget line: the department spent $365.9 million on casual relief teachers in the twelve months to May 2024, more than 54 per cent higher than in 2019, roughly $1 million a day. Annual attrition remains substantial too — the Teacher Workforce Snapshot 2024 records 5.2 per cent of primary and 7.7 per cent of secondary government teachers leaving the system in the year it measured. Permission-to-Teach authorisations, a stopgap letting people without a full teaching qualification take a classroom — most often in languages, VET, humanities, science, maths and physical education — rose 21 per cent to 2,164 in 2024, itself a sign that ordinary supply has not kept pace with demand in those subjects. On health, the Victorian Skills Authority projects the state needs 59,267 additional health workers by 2026, more than a quarter of them in rural and regional Victoria (approx.), a figure calculated after the scholarship scheme, the new enterprise agreement and international recruitment were already running. The ratio law's own rollout illustrates the same pattern from the policy side: legislating a ratio is not the same as staffing it, which is why the government built a staged, multi-year timetable, and the full 457 extra nursing and midwifery positions have only been a legal requirement since 1 July 2026 — more than three-and-a-half years after they were first promised at the 2022 election.
The critique
The problem is not that Victoria has under-invested — it has committed billions of dollars to pay, scholarships and incentives — but that so much of the new money has gone to raising the price of the existing workforce rather than expanding its number fast enough to close the gap the government's own data describe. The Legislative Council's Legal and Social Issues Committee, reporting on the state education system on 15 October 2024, found the Targeted Financial Incentives scheme was drawing teachers to shuffle between hard-to-staff schools chasing successive payments rather than settling into one community, undermining continuity for the students the scheme was meant to help, and recommended the department shift emphasis from recruitment bonuses toward retaining staff already in the system. That is a retention problem dressed up as a recruitment solution: a school can advertise a $50,000 incentive and still open the year without a permanent teacher if the person who takes the bonus leaves for a bigger one at the next school along. The $365.9 million a year now spent on casual relief teachers is the clearest evidence that the underlying gap has been managed through casualisation rather than closed — a budget line that has grown 54 per cent since 2019 even as free-degree places and pay rises have expanded the pipeline.
A pay rise makes the workforce more expensive to lose. It does not, by itself, fill the roster.
The same tension applies on the health side. The nurses' enterprise agreement and the ratio law's staged rollout are real, legislated improvements to pay, conditions and safety — but they are also large new recurrent costs landing on a budget the state's own papers show carrying net debt projected to reach $185.2 billion by June 2028, with interest costs alone running at roughly $10.6 billion a year (approx.). Every dollar directed to lifting the price of an existing nurse, teacher or midwife is a dollar not available to train or recruit an additional one, and the Victorian Skills Authority's own projection — 59,267 more health workers needed by 2026 — suggests wage growth and scholarships together have not yet closed a gap that size. The $270 million nursing scholarship scheme, similarly, only opened to students who commenced study by the 2024 second-semester census date; without a confirmed successor round, its effect on future supply is time-limited just as the ratio law's staffing requirement reaches full strength. None of this means the strategy has failed outright — the Department of Education's own modelling shows the projected 2030 secondary shortfall narrowing — but it does mean the government's preferred measure, dollars committed, is not the same as the measure that matters to a family waiting for a permanent teacher or a ward waiting for a rostered nurse: whether the position is actually filled.
The risk to the future
The bill for a more expensive workforce is rising faster than the vacancy count is falling
The teacher pay deal and the nurses' enterprise agreement are now locked in as recurrent commitments running to 2029 and 2028 respectively, at the same time as the government's own workforce strategy still projects a shortfall of more than 59,000 health workers by 2026 and the Department of Education's modelling still shows Victoria short of secondary and primary teacher demand by 2030, even after the free-degree pipeline. If enrolments and patient demand keep growing roughly in line with population, as both departments' own projections assume, a strategy built mainly around raising the price of the existing workforce risks running out of runway before it closes the gap — leaving schools to keep buying $365.9 million a year of casual cover and hospitals to keep leaning on the overtime and internal transfers the ratio law was designed to end. Regional Victoria carries the sharper edge of that risk: the AEU-Monash survey found three in four principals had faced a shortage in the past year, and regional and remote vacancies attract fewer applicants on average than metropolitan ones — exactly the imbalance the $50,000 incentive scheme was built to fix, and which the Legislative Council found it was instead partly recycling between schools. If burnout continues at the rate the same survey recorded — 73 per cent of staff reporting it, alongside an average 12.5 hours of unpaid overtime a week — the workforce the government has now agreed to pay more to keep may keep leaving anyway, and the next round of vacancies will need to be filled by a pipeline that has not yet proven it can grow faster than demand.