Scholarships for rural teachers

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HIGH-QUALITY teachers are being offered up to $50,000 to work in hard-to-staff country schools.

Design and technology teachers are the latest to be targeted under the Education Department's scholarship program to ensure the state's public school students have access to the best teachers.

Five $50,000 country teaching scholarships targeting high-quality final-year design and technology teacher education students were advertised this week.

Three more $40,000 scholarships were also offered to university students in their final year of maths and science teaching to meet the demand in country areas.

A department spokeswoman said there was a shortage of design and technology teachers, who were needed in middle school for classes such as woodwork and metalwork and in the senior years for vocational education and training qualifications that led to trades.

"Incentives for all targeted recruits include scholarship money, permanent employment and ongoing support in their first years of teaching," the spokeswoman said.

"The department is keen to recruit high-quality design and technology teachers and for this reason does not have a specific target (capping the number of scholarships to be offered).

"Yearly targets are set to ensure that there is sufficient demand and scholarship numbers are determined based on this information."

The spokeswoman said future scholarship and incentive programs would ensure schools had a maths, science and design and technology teaching workforce that was highly skilled.

This workforce would support the state's science, technology, engineering and maths skills strategy.

Since 2010 under the Teach SA program, the department has provided 13 scholarships to high-quality final-year maths and science teacher education students and 20 career-change maths and science professionals.

Four architecture and industrial design professionals have been recruited to train as technology teachers.

More than 120 teachers have been retrained in maths and science.

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