Abstract
A person is defined as ‘STEM-qualified’ if their highest completed qualification is a Bachelor Degree or higher level university qualification in one of these fields. Some figures presented here relate to the combination of these three fields, referred to as ‘Total STEM’. The data come from the 2011 Census. The Census (and most other data sources) asks people for their highest qualification, not for all their qualifications. This will generally lead to some under-estimation of the number of persons with a given type of qualification. For instance, a person who completes an undergraduate degree in a STEM field, but then goes on to complete a higher degree in a non-STEM field, would not be counted as ‘STEM-qualified’ due to this data limitation. It is clear from an examination of the data for people with mathematics or science qualifications that this poses a particular problem with respect to teachers. A high proportion of secondary school teachers has a graduate diploma or masters degree in education. Being ‘higher degrees’, these displace the bachelor degree and cause many teachers with maths and science degrees to be recorded as being qualified in education rather than STEM. The numbers are likely to be large—perhaps 80,000 or more. The Census data record only 6,483 secondary school teachers as having a Natural or Physical Sciences degree (out of a total of 174,910 NPS graduates who are in the workforce). The figures that follow are therefore under-estimates of the size of the STEM workforce.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA) |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Place of Publication | Melbourne |
| Publication status | Published - 2013 |