What are the main challenges facing teacher education in Australia?

In our series, Better Teachers, we’ll explore how to improve teacher education in Australia. We’ll look at what the evidence says on a range of themes including how to raise the status of the profession and measure and improve teacher quality.

Top-performing international education systems value expert teaching and recognise that highly effective teaching improves student outcomes.

While there are some reforms in development, further work is required in Australia to lift the quality of teaching by attracting the brightest candidates into the profession and ensuring they receive the best preparation and ongoing support.

The federal government’s new requirement for teacher education students to be in the top 30% for literacy and numeracy is important. However, an effective teacher has more attributes that this.

Of the almost 4,000 teaching students who undertook the literacy and numeracy test in May-June this year, 95.4% met the literacy standard and 93.1% met the numeracy standard. So this measure’s impact is minimal.

This was only one recommendation of the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG). There are 38 others still in the process of being implemented.

With key recommendations around tougher accreditation standards, TEMAG’s framework challenges initial teacher education providers to develop high-quality programs that can be rigorously assessed.

Universities will need to be able to demonstrate the positive impact they have on their graduates and that their graduates have on student learning. The latter is the mark of effective teaching.

TEMAG’s recommendations are not window-dressing. A paradigm shift, deep program reform and university support will be required to tackle current problems in teaching quality.

Too many teachers

Poor workforce planning by governments is further exacerbating concerns about teaching quality in Australia: supply is not well matched to demand.

The uncapping of undergraduate places in 2012 led some universities to exploit the fact that they receive funding for as many students as they can enrol. This has been a factor in the oversupply, giving the impression universities use teaching courses as a “cash cow”.

The largest education department, New South Wales, hired just 6% of the state’s graduates on full-time contracts last year. Education Minister Adrian Piccoli made the point that universities:

… have doubled entrants in the last ten years … They should take fewer and do a better job [of training them].

By investing wisely in the best evidence-based teacher education programs, the federal government can foster quality teaching without increasing total funding. This would also overcome the ethical issue of preparing teachers who have little chance of being employed.

Undersupply of specialist teachers

Despite general oversupply, Australia is experiencing a significant undersupply of language, geography, computing and history teachers, as well as secondary maths, physics and chemistry teachers, and qualified teachers in some regional areas.

As a result, more than 20% of secondary mathematics and 17% of secondary science teachers are unqualified in their field. Without even year 12 training in these fields, many science and maths teachers lack the ability to spark enthusiasm for these subjects in their students. This is why TEMAG recommended the introduction of specialist maths and science primary teachers.