Confusion, a lack of staffing and poor goal-setting have all played a role in preventing a four-year rural education strategy from achieving much at all two years in, a report says.
The NSW Rural and Remote Education Strategy aimed to fix the issues of a 2013 blueprint that had little success in closing the gap between the state's 200,000 regional and rural public school students and their city counterparts.
But the strategy promising to put country kids front and centre did not learn from past mistakes and bears a striking resemblance to the 2013 blueprint, an audit report has found.
For example, the 2013 objective to "address wellbeing needs through effective partnerships and connections" became "address wellbeing needs through connections with local communities" in 2021.
It leaves the strategy unlikely to achieve its vision to provide every child in regional NSW access to the same quality of education as their metropolitan peers, Auditor-General Margaret Crawford said in her report released on Thursday.
Data obtained during the audit showed most language classes in outer regional or remote areas are led by non-language teachers, and enrolment in top English or maths subjects in HSC is far lower in the regions.
About one in two remote and very remote students are below the national minimum standard for reading and numeracy.
After its announcement to great fanfare in February 2021, the education department took a year to recruit a regional-based policy team, and almost two years to set up proper oversights for the "whole-of-systems" approach.
Additional resources were not provided, measures of success were not defined, and progress was not publicly reported.
Deputy Premier and education minister Prue Car slammed the policy as spin by the previous government, and said she has tasked senior department officials with looking at immediate ways to improve outcomes.
Ms Car identified teacher vacancies in particular as hurting rural and regional schools, and said increasing teachers' pay was key to attracting more graduates to those areas.
Amid tense pay negotiations between the government and the teachers' union, Ms Car says there is agreement on both sides that teachers need a "massive" pay rise.
"The last offer that we made was for the first year for teachers to be given probably the biggest pay rise they've seen in a generation," she said.
Ms Car said the Teachers Federation still took issue with the government's offer of a 2.5 per cent pay rise for each of the following three years.
Sarah Mitchell, who was education minister until March, called on the department to accept the auditor-general's seven recommendations and stressed the importance of ensuring senior departmental staff responsible for the strategy were based outside the cities.
The education department has accepted the recommendations and committed to including closing the remoteness gap in its department-wide strategic plan set to start next year.
