The Australian Education Union (AEU) in Tasmania will be seeking for teachers near retirement age to be offered payouts in order to open teaching opportunities for young educators.

Union president Leanne Wright claimed, “There are a number of people who are saying at the moment that they're probably one or two years out of retirement but that they need to stay in for financial reasons... So there are probably quite a few who might take up an early retirement if there was a financial incentive.”

Approximately 40 percent of Tasmania's teaching workforce is aged 50 and over. An early retirement payout could free up teaching positions for university teaching graduates.

In Tasmania, the average age of a teacher is 48 years. A significantly large number of new teachers, however, resign in the first five years.

Dan White of the Catholic Education Office said, “It really is a demographic issue. The baby boomers are going to retire and I will be happily one of them, but more seriously, teaching was seen as a very highly desirable career back in the '70s, and there's now a cohort of people that have moved through
together and will be approaching retirement age together.”

Jean Walker of the AEU explained that when new teachers “find themselves not very well supported in a school or they find that it doesn't - isn't really panning out as they thought it might do, they do look around for other work.”