When Schools Can’t Find the Right Teacher: Expanding Access to Learning

A student’s future should not depend on whether their school can find a qualified chemistry teacher this year—but that’s often how geography-bound education works.

When the PISA 2022 report revealed declines in performance and widening gaps across countries, it’s easy to point to motivation or effort. This conversation takes a different angle: what if the real constraint is the structure of schooling and how learning is organized?

Dr. Lisa Hassler is joined by Maurice O’Shannassy, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Sagecool. With a background in building complex global systems, Maurice turned his attention to a growing issue in education: teacher shortages and limited access to subject expertise. He shares how Sagecool is designed to connect students and teachers beyond geographic constraints, helping schools and families better match learning needs with teacher expertise and teaching approaches.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• how staffing limitations affect access to learning opportunities
• how access to the “right teacher” goes beyond availability to include subject expertise and student fit
• what it could look like to connect students with teachers beyond their local school
• how data and learning enhancement technology (LET) can support teaching and learning
• what this approach could mean for rural and lower-resourced schools and communities

This conversation invites educators, school leaders, and families to reflect on where access—not effort—may be limiting opportunity, and to consider how expanding access to teaching could better support students and teachers alike.

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Sponsored by Dr. Gregg Hassler Jr., DMD
Trusted dental care for healthy smiles and stronger communities—building brighter futures daily.

Transcript

What PISA 2022 Reveals

Meet Maurice And The Shortage Spark

Dr. Lisa Hassler 0:19

Many of our assumptions about schooling feel so familiar that we rarely question them where learning happens, who teaches whom, and what limits are considered fixed. In this episode, we explore what becomes possible when those assumptions are reconsidered. Welcome to the brighter side of education, research, innovation, and resources. I'm your host, Dr. Lisa Hassler, here to enlighten and brighten the classrooms in America through focused conversation on important topics in education. In each episode, I discuss problems we as teachers and parents are facing and what people are doing in their communities to fix it. What are the variables? And how can we duplicate it to maximize student outcomes? One of the most widely respected international measures of student learning is the Program for International Student Assessment, commonly known as PISA. Conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD, every three years, PISA assesses 15-year-old students in reading, mathematics, and science. Unlike traditional exams, though, PISA does not design to test memorization or curriculum coverage. It measures how well students can apply knowledge, reason through problems, and transfer learning to real world contexts. The most recent PISA 2022 results revealed several concerning trends. Across many countries, student performance declined, learning gaps widened, and disengagement increased. Perhaps most striking, the data showed that gaps persist not only between nations, but within them, where geography, access, and school structures continue to shape opportunity far more than individual potential. What's important to note is that PISA does not point to a lack of effort. Teachers are working harder than ever. Schools are adopting new tools, programs, and interventions, yet outcomes remain uneven. This suggests that the challenges may not lie in what educators are doing, but in the structures they are working within. Traditional education systems are still largely bound by geography. Students' access to subjects, specialists, and learning pathways depends heavily on where they live. Teachers are likewise constrained by school staffing needs, oftentimes resulting in teaching outside their subjects. These structural constraints raise a bigger question, not just about what we teach, but about how learning itself is organized. Joining us today is Maurice O'Shaughnessy, executive chairman and co-founder of Sage Cool, a global learning platform designed to connect students and teachers beyond the limits of geography. Maurice's professional background spans decades in global finance and economic systems, including work with the Australian Commonwealth Treasury and BlackRock. He brings a career-long perspective in building and leading complex international systems, having worked across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Today, his work focuses on how education can be structured to better support access, specialization, and flexibility at scale. In this conversation, we'll explore what it might look like to move beyond incremental fixes and instead rethink the underlying infrastructure of learning and what that could mean for students, teachers, and communities around the world. Welcome to the brighter side of education, Maurice.

Maurice O'Shannassy 3:50

Thank you, Lucy.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 3:50

You've spent a lot of your career in the finance area with global systems, markets, institutions. What led you to turn your attention into the education realm?

Maurice O'Shannassy 4:01

Yeah, well, my my brother's been a teacher for 30 something years. And then he was in consulting in the industry as well. And he came to me a few years back and said, Do you know all about the teacher shortage? And I said, I've got no idea at all. It's not something I follow. And he said, Well, it's basically DEF CON 1, you know, uh the teacher shortage in Australia. The schools can't get teachers, and it's especially prevalent in the rural areas, obviously. And so, you know, you've got students who might be doing year 11 and 12, you know, mathematics or whatever, and they they can't do the subject because there's no teacher. And I said, Oh, that's interesting. So he had this thought that we could develop an online system where the teacher could teach from anywhere and teach uh students from numerous schools at once. So that would help solve the problem. So I thought that sounds really interesting. So that was the start of the journey. I I had no idea it would take another three years, uh, a whole team of computer people developing algorithms and all sorts of stuff. And also the search to realize that this is a global problem. You know, we're Australia is just a mirror of exactly what's happening in literally all around the world with the teacher shortage.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 5:08

Yeah, we're feeling it here in the US, of course. And it's not even just trying to find uh a teacher to come into the classroom, but it's also qualified in the subject areas. Teachers are being put into positions where they're not really the expert in that topic.

How SageCool Matches Teachers

Maurice O'Shannassy 5:25

Yeah, no, it's exactly what's happening in Australia. He was experiencing that himself. He was had to teach subjects who are outside of his expertise. Yeah, the teachers are increasingly asked to do more admin. So it's it's the sort of what they call the outside of teaching activities, which was taking up more and more of their time. So teachers are leaving the profession. Then you had a lot of student behavior issues post-COVID. So when I started researching, I was looking at the all the OECD reports and the UNESCO reports. It's exactly the same everywhere.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 5:53

So, how did you address that problem with SageCool? What is it and how does it work?

Maurice O'Shannassy 5:58

Yeah, well, it it basically it's an infrastructure which matches teachers with students. And that could be either through the schools or through a homeschooler. What it isn't, it's not a school, it's not associated with any school. It doesn't replace the school experience for those who want the school experience. So it might well be that the students just doing one or two subjects online, or it could well be they're doing all of them. It doesn't matter where the teacher is, and it doesn't matter where the student is. Basically, how it works is the teacher puts in how they want to teach. So they put in their expertise, their history, their experience, etc., etc. And they might say, look, we I want to specialise in this type of learning student. It might be an ADHD, it might be uh a religion, it could be anything that they determine. We don't determine it. Then the teacher might put up onto the system what sort of technology they're using. We don't call it AI, we call it learning enhancement technology, because that's what it really is. So the teacher puts up all of that information, then the school or the homeschooler or the parent they'll go into the system and and search and find the appropriate teachers that suit that student's needs. The teacher then puts up how they're going to structure their class. Again, it's totally up to them. It might be the student has to watch videos, it might be a combination, it might be student-led groups, all sorts of things. So the school's uh or the parent has now got a list of teachers that suit that student's needs. They'll see the teacher's timetable preferences, and then the school or the parent will be able to say, okay, well, that time that's that one suits my timetable, that one doesn't, etc. etc. We've got these algorithms that below the bonnet, as we call it, that you will start to see the teacher's classes getting filled with students that suit their specialty, and then from the school or the parent's perspective, they will put in their preferences, so preference one for a certain teacher, for two, and so the system will start allocating those preferences, and that student will then get allocated to the highest preference teacher that's available because the teacher puts in their minimum, maximum sizes and all the rest of it. So it's this this sort of healthy dynamic, if you like. So if you're at a school, for instance, you know, at 11 in the morning you might go to room 101, and there you are with a screen, and there's students from say 15 different schools from all over the country, all with the same specialty need that you might have, and but taught by a teacher who specializes in that need. And from the teacher's point of view, they could be still at the school, but doing this as an extra thing if they want to earn some extra money, or they could they could be a retiree that just goes, I'm just gonna do one class, or they could do absolutely full-time, saying I'm doing three or four of these classes, and that's gonna be my day. And if you're the school or the or the the parent, you might want to choose as across a certain different style of of teaching, of teams that are doing it, etc. etc. etc. So that's an important aspect of the systems. That's sort of how it works.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 8:54

So a teacher, if they were interested in wanting to become part of it, they would go to the website and they would go through an application process and put their information in. Okay.

Benefits For Students Schools Teachers

Maurice O'Shannassy 9:02

Yeah, we can be anywhere in the world. So we've built it to be adjusted to any country or state. And every country and every state's going to have their own rules and regulations. So we've built it such that we'll say, well, whatever your the way you structure your education system, we'll just adjust the system to that. And likewise for security, we're we've built it so underneath it, what what we call it nuclear code security. So every country's going to have its own level of rules and regulations and whatnot. And so we'll be able to say, Well, you tell us what you want, and we'll build that level of security into the system. Eventually you'll you'll start to see competing curriculums up there as well. Not just a curriculum for each state or country, but into a sort of an ecosystem for uh competing ideas uh in in terms of how to teach kids and all the rest of it.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 9:55

What kind of benefits, if we're going to go down like students, teachers, schools, how would this help them?

Maurice O'Shannassy 10:01

Well, the obvious one obviously is uh when they can't find the teacher to do their their subject. And so, yeah, let you're in a country school, you might have a higher level year 12 mathematics, and you might have three or four students that are really good at it and want to do it, but you have can't find their teacher. And so that will this should instantly solve that problem, but no it it'll solve it to another level, actually, because not only will you be able to find a teacher, you'll be able to find a teacher that suits those children's needs. So you you're actually going from not having a teacher at all to having one that's bet that that they can specialise. That that's pretty exciting. And for the underprivileged kids, they'll they'll have access to any subject and the best teachers in that subject. So it just so much broadens what that what they can do. For the schools, obviously, they can provide lessons that they couldn't, whether you're in the city or the country. And for the teachers, they now get to teach in their specialty. They're not doing all the extra admin work. If they want to form a team, they get to have continuous learning in their specialty and they're not subject to location. A lot more flexibility, obviously. So if you're at the school, you might be able to want to teach online as well. Or if you want to just teach part-time, if you've got young children, it might suit you a lot better to be teaching from home and uh or suit teaching certain times rather than other times. And then for retirees, this is where it gets really interesting. Like rather than watching the grass grow, you know, if you've been a teacher for 30 years and you still might want to keep your hand in it and and teach one subject. Or you could be from another industry and retrain yourself. You know, you might have been an accountant for 40 years and you're sitting there, you're retired, you you know, you've got a lot more time on your hands now, and you want to still feel feel useful. And so the possibilities from the teacher's point of view, in terms of flexibility, remuneration, teaching in their specialty is a really important thing. Another interesting thing is student behaviour. In a lot of the virtual schools that and and people who are doing virtual lessons that we speak to say that student behaviour changes when they get into an online lesson. So you might have some students that weren't suited to sitting in the classroom or whatever. So that's another interesting aspect. I I think we're in an education revolution, there's no doubt in my mind, having been to all these conferences now all around the world. But the wheel's in spin and no one knows where it's going to end up, really. It's really early days, in my view. And so, you know, you you will have an infrastructure here where we can allow a lot of experimentation. From a society's point of view, I think it could be a helpful step in the direction of the reinvention of education, which is clearly taking place globally. And it's very, very early days, from what I can see. A lot of it gets will get down to measurement and all that sort of stuff. It's a long-winded answer to your question.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 12:57

Well, let's jump into measurement. Your system tracks progress for both students and for teachers. How are you using that data to make it feel empowering rather than burdensome? And then how does that shift in performance measurement impact teachers? What does it mean for teachers?

Learning Tech Hub And Tools

Maurice O'Shannassy 13:13

Yeah, well, there's another dimension to the measurement aspect. If we take the the lifelong learning for the teacher, firstly, you know, there's technology which I'm sure you're aware of now that you can be measuring how the teacher's performing and the teacher be getting feedback live in their class online. You know, they can see whether student number six is understanding what they just said and all that sort of stuff. And so there's this constant feedback, live feedback the teacher can now get. You've now got you know they call it AI, but one of the root systems being developed where that can give them feedback saying, Well, you know, if you're doing the class in this way, this sort of student might not understand, etc. etc. There's new ones of those coming out every day virtually. So that it our system will allow the teacher to get feedback to help them improve their lesson as they go forward. So hopefully, you know, from year to year, they're getting better and better and better at it. Really, you're getting constant live feedback, and so you improve. That'll be a very important aspect of the teacher using it to develop lifelong learning. And I think that's what's going to come forward in the next few years, is there'll be a lot more measurements of how the students are learning and the results, which are not just do this exam, here's your mark. So that'll all, when you think about it, if we can provide all that to the teacher, they can be using that feedback to enhance the way doing the class. And so they'll be able to tailor through feedback. So getting better and better at teaching certain students certain ways. So you can imagine there'll be a a myriad of measurement things which are helpful to the teachers, data feedback, which if you stand in front of a class, you're probably not getting we're certainly not getting it live. So that's a really important aspect as to why we nearly need to be open architecture. The other aspect, of course, is from the student's perspective, the school and the parent's perspective, is how do I know whether this teacher is actually done a good job? And it's a really difficult measure because you know, how do you measure an outcome when the the students have different socioeconomic backgrounds, different skill levels, all sorts of things? So we'll be doing what they call multivariate analysis, adjusted for all sorts of factors to get these sorts of results for the student. And I don't think that's existed anywhere in any country at the moment. So they're they're the two big dimensions of the data aspect of it, which is really important to the system that you will now be able to do because it's all online.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 15:46

Part of the research that I was reading in your presentation dealt with engagement and comprehension based off of eye tracking when you're talking about technology and AI and measuring, are those sorts of tools that you would uh consider employing? And how does SageCool plan on navigating that landscape for AI and those those technical softwares for teachers? How are you going to be making sense of all of that?

Maurice O'Shannassy 16:16

So, what we want to do is be the infrastructure where all of this comes onto our infrastructure and then then the teachers, schools, and everyone really nice way of being able to work out what's who's who at the zoo, so to speak. So imagine you're on our system and you go, okay, I'm a maths teacher. I'm going to go into the LET module on our system and go, mathematics, what consultants are out there, and these consultants will know exactly what's going on around the world and all the math. So you can either see what is there or go and get consultants. And you could do that by every subject, you could do it by teaching style, you could do it by all sorts of things. That's what's missing in the world, really, a central hub. And so the eye tracking one you brought up, there's a lot of them out there now. And so you can imagine you're on the screen, you've got say 20 in your class, and up pops to you as the teacher, you know, student number 10 didn't understand what you just said. Yeah, that's powerful. And then the student can be typing in, knowing they're not embarrassing themselves by asking questions, but just to you. You could stop, do a five-minute quiz in the middle of it and see who's really getting it. So you adjust your lesson, and that's just one thing. There's an array of ways this can be done. But what's not there right now, as far as I can see, is an easy place for someone to just go school, students, teachers, different things coming out around the world. How do I know what's out there? How do I know what's good? We want to be part of that infrastructure where they can easily do all that.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 17:46

We talked about low socioeconomic status and being able to match up students who have limited resources to teachers around the world. How would a a system like Sage Cool play a role in changing that for students?

Maurice O'Shannassy 18:00

Aaron Powell Obviously, coming from Australia with rules and and and underprivileged kids in the rural side, particularly in Australia with indigenous children, there's huge advantages for the rural and the underprivileged going into, say, let's just take Africa as an example, but it could be a lot of these very poor countries. What are they lacking in in terms of the education? Well, you know, lots of things obviously, but one of the really big things is teachers. Access to the subjects that they might want it depending on their culture. And all of a sudden, someone in the remote area of a pro impoverished country is getting access to any subject from the best teachers anywhere in the world. And the UNESCO report highlighted this that one of the big problems they've all got is that they can't get access to the internet. Computers isn't really a problem because there's lots of old computers. You don't need a powerful computer to teach an online lesson. You can actually have a situation where someone sitting anywhere in the world who's really suited to teaching these kids in a certain country, totally impoverished, and all of a sudden they've got access to literally any subject. So you apply all the criteria of what we're doing, measurement, access to the best teachers that suit your needs. So a lot of these children in these countries will have different cultural types of things. So you know it'll require different skills for the teacher. And so all of a sudden, in what seems an intractable problem, we could be fast-forwarding all sorts of things to the world's most impoverished. And you know, I think the UNESCO report said by 2030 there's going to be a shortage of 30 million teachers worldwide.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 19:36

Looking globally across different countries and contexts, what possibilities do you see for this model?

Maurice O'Shannassy 19:42

Well, we we've built it so you could do it in any language. So the global possibilities is we've structured it so that we're we will be completely consistent with whatever that country's criteria is. People who lived in that country are now living in another country but still might want to be a teacher. Like Australia's a good example. We've we've got there'll be thousands of Australians living in Asia who could easily be teaching kids in Australia by the same token. Like education export's one of Australia's biggest exports. So we have and at this mainly at university, but also at schools, that you could imagine, say in Vietnam, kids all going to a school, but they're doing the year 12 curriculum. So there is endless combinations of how this could end up. One point I didn't mention earlier is that you know the student goes to room 101 at 11 o'clock for their math class, and there's students in 15 different schools all on the one-line thing. Well, they're going to be interacting with very different dynamics to the children at their own school.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 20:41

Also, I think about sometimes small schools have limited resources, even with resource teachers, reading interventions, let's say, or speech pathology. And so you could see where then the students may not have access to that because the school may not be able to afford a speech pathologist. But then on this platform, there could be a really great speech pathologist that can service children across the state, across the country, in different countries. And so it's actually giving the students the ability, like you were saying, with the different subjects, also access to different resources that could help with their interventions.

Maurice O'Shannassy 21:18

Totally. Sciences get really interested in this space.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 21:21

Yeah.

Maurice O'Shannassy 21:22

Yeah, there's lots of software out there now where I can do experiments online that you cannot do in a physical lab. You can do gene splitting, lots of companies out there now that provide all this. Yeah. And so you could be sitting in the middle of, let's say, the sub-Saharan desert in Africa doing lab lab experiments that students who are in a real lab can't do. So when it comes to things like that, the pr the sciences, you get into some really interesting space where, you know, we haven't got a physical lab, so this'll do. It's actually, in many cases, could be a lot better. You know, it's early days and all of this stuff. So it's pretty exciting.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 22:02

Thank you so much for joining us and for taking the time to talk about how learning can be organized in a very different way and to look beyond the familiar assumptions of schooling and answering some of these questions as to how can we restructure education. Systems to better meet the needs of people, especially in faces of shortages.

Maurice O'Shannassy 22:24

Yeah, no, thanks, Lisa. It's been a pleasure. And it's pretty exciting times ahead, I think.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 22:29

Where can a teacher or a family go, a school, if they are interested in looking into SageCool?

Maurice O'Shannassy 22:37

Just go on to SageCool.com.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 22:38

All right. Well, thank you so much.

Maurice O'Shannassy 22:40

Thanks, Lisa.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 22:41

As you reflect on today's conversation, consider where structure, not effort, may be limiting opportunity for learners or teachers in your own context. Whether you're an educator, school leader, or parent, this episode is an invitation to think differently about how learning can be organized to better support specialization, access, and flexibility. If this conversation sparked new thinking, I encourage you to continue exploring what's possible when we design systems that work with people, not around them. If you have a story about what's working in your schools that you'd like to share, you can email me at Lisa at drisaarhassler.com or visit my website at www.drlisaarhassler.com and send me a message. If you like this podcast, subscribe and tell a friend. The more people that know, the bigger impact it will have. And if you find value to the content in this podcast, consider becoming a supporter by clicking on the supporter link in the show notes. It is the mission of this podcast to shine light on the good in education so that it spreads, affecting positive change. So let's keep working together to find solutions that focus on our children's success.