Principals will have the option of advertising permanent classroom teacher positions when they become vacant under proposed improvements to school staffing arrangements.

The education department’s director-general, Michael Coutts-Trotter, said the improvements were designed to give schools a greater say in the selection of staff.

“We want more opportunity for teachers to move between schools based on their ability and experience and on the needs of the school,” he said.

“At present schools have no say in approximately 90 per cent of classroom teacher appointments and only three in every 100 classroom teaching positions are open to all of our teachers.”

The proposed improvements will not affect teachers on nominated, compassionate or incentive transfers, or how Aboriginal teachers and scholarship holders are allocated to schools.

“There will be no loss of teaching positions or tenure, and priority transfers will be retained unchanged,” Mr Coutts-Trotter said.

“The department remains the employer, the department still has a responsibility to ensure there is a qualified teacher in every classroom in every school.”

The Minister for Education and Training, John Della Bosca, said more schools “will now have the option of either having a teacher centrally allocated or choosing their own through open advertisements”. Mr Della Bosca said the move would open up jobs to more teacher education graduates and to the thousands of qualified teachers registered with the department but working outside the NSW public education system or the state.

He said schools in regional NSW and south-western Sydney had already used open advertisements for classroom teacher positions, resulting in “large numbers of top quality applicants for each position”.

Mr Coutts-Trotter said schools could still take teachers from the service transfer list but after Term 2, 2010, principals would no longer be obliged to accept the teacher at the top of the list.

The president of the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council, Jim McAlpine, said the proposals were “quite conservative”.

“Members of the SPC have been aware for a long time that principals being held accountable for the educational outcomes of a school without having a significant say into their staffing creates a very difficult tension,” he said.

The principals’ group had not formally endorsed the proposal but had given the department its “informed critique”.

Mr Coutts-Trotter said the improvements would not make it harder to attract teachers to some schools. Service transfer list data over the past two years had shown that half the teachers who transferred chose schools in communities with the same or lower socio-economic circumstances, he said.

However, the director-general and the minister said they would hold discussions with public education stakeholders to devise additional incentives to attract and retain teachers in remote and difficult to staff schools.

Mr Della Bosca said he was committed “to finding even better ways to encourage and reward teachers who move into these schools”.