200 Bendigo teaching students could qualify for placement support

About 200 student teachers enrolled at Bendigo will be eligible for help with housing, travel and meals from mid-year, providing they do their teaching placement at a "more rural" or "hard-to-staff" location.

The new funding to support regional and rural teacher trainees should have a positive impact on desperately low teacher numbers, La Trobe University teacher educators say.

State government funding - made up of $32.2 million for "pre-service teacher" placements and $2.7 million for university-school partnership programs - was allocated in last month's budget and announced on Friday by Minister for Education Natalie Hutchins at La Trobe's Flora Hill campus.

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The minister said the aim of the assistance was not only to support students who needed it but to make sure there was a "pipeline of teachers".

"By getting pre-service teachers into place we get a relationship and a connection that starts to form," she said.

It was hoped those students would return to work in the areas they had formed links with after completing their study.

The amount of assistance available to each student teacher will be calculated on a case-by-case basis, the minister said, with a sliding scale applying, according to distance and the difficulty of relocation.

The average figure would be $1467 per year.

La Trobe Dean of Education Joanna Barbousas said that currently student teachers "almost have to put [their] life on hold" during placements.

"This kind of funding goes a long way to essentially saying to future teachers, 'We hear you, we know what you're going through and we also support quality practices,'" she said.

Senior education lecturer Dr Steve Murphy described the initiative as "a very strong acknowledgement of a crisis in rural and regional education in terms of workforce supply".

The new support and the $2.7 million to extend TAPP (Teaching Academies of Professional Practice) programs - enabling universities to work with partner schools on placements - were key to ensuring the supply of teachers, he said.

La Trobe's education department was also working on a range of other initiatives that would help Victorian regions.

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It had this year rolled out new bachelor and masters degrees and hoped to extend its award-winning Nexus program - which provides an employment-based pathway into secondary teaching for teachers at lower socioeconomic, culturally diverse, and hard-to-staff schools.

Georgia Breewel, in her final year of a masters of primary teaching, had been working evenings and weekends in hospitality to cover her living expenses but found herself so tired it impacted her capacity to learn, she said.

While she wouldn't benefit personally from the assistance because she was in her final semester and doing placements in Bendigo, she felt positive about it.

"Trying to balance life - the exhaustion of trying to work and earn an income and with inflation so high at the moment it's really very difficult," she said.

"For the people who are eligible it's going to make so much of a difference."

Third year primary teaching student Lucy Wade said she had worked weekends during placements just to "afford to be alive - to pay rent and pay bills and eat."

Fellow third year primary teaching student Mitchell Burke, who hails from Horsham, believed the new payment would "definitely be a help".

"Because currently whether you have kids or families or or are just supporting yourself, it's actually very difficult not being able to work for three, four, six weeks - whatever it is [that you're on placement].

"You give up work, you have to give up your time here in Bendigo and whatever else it is," he said.

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