In response to Labor's Teach Next announcement today AEU Federal President Angelo Gavrielatos said:

“It seems extraordinary that Labor has created a policy designed to recruit people who 'have been put off by the time it takes to meet qualification hurdles'.

“Every student deserves to be taught by a fully-qualified teacher.

“While we should be looking at ways to get people from other professions into teaching, allowing them to take up a teaching role with only eight weeks training is the wrong approach.

“The skills required to teach children cannot be learned in such a short period of time.

 “The focus should be on addressing the things that make it hard to recruit people into teaching and to keep our best teachers in the classroom: high workloads, large class sizes and inadequate career paths,” he said.