Half a million dollars has been spent on overseas advertising to attract foreign teachers to New Zealand.

That includes a $200,000 campaign last year - which the Ministry of Education say resulted in 17,000 applications.

Labour says it inherited a teacher supply crisis, and this is the only way to deal with it.

PPTA President Jack Boyle told Kate Hawkesby that the campaign was absolutely necessary.

"We were looking at a trajectory of 40 per cent fewer people coming into initial teacher education in 2019 from 2013. Something had to be done."

He says that they ideally want more New Zealanders to be trained to be teachers, but there was not enough time and this short-term fix was needed.