Dr Steven Reissig, a former Scottsdale High School principal and former acting principal at Ravenswood Primary School, is now a consultant to the undersecretary of education in Bahrain.

He spoke to the University of Tasmania's education faculty about public education yesterday and described Tasmania's education system as at a tipping point.

Dr Reissig said that the sector needed to urgently address the issue of inadequate teachers.

``There are some high performing and most talented teachers in our system here in Tasmania but I'm sure across the system there are some teachers that are underperforming, who are not doing the best that they can as a teacher and they are protected by unions and they are stuffing the system,'' Dr Reissig said.

``So what often happens is that they move from one school to another because they're underperforming but the children themselves are the ones that are suffering.''

He said the ageing teacher workforce and the number of graduates unable to find work would force many to leave the state, move into another profession or go overseas and the state would suffer for it.

Dr Reissig said he was keen to return to Tasmania but believed the work opportunities were not here, nor was there any interest in recruiting education professionals from interstate or overseas.

``I think some states, particularly on the mainland, they're open to new people looking at existing problems and maybe here in Tasmania there could be a sense of the same people who are in the system at the moment, trying to fix the same problems with the same policy-makers who initiated them,'' Dr Reissig said.

He said the relatively recent appointment of those from interstate into the department was a step in the right direction.