Reforming teachers: how will the government’s Initial Teacher Education reform agenda affect the sector?
There have been more than 100 reviews of teacher education in Australia since the 1970s.1 Reforming teaching and teacher education appears to have been seen as a ‘policy problem’ by successive Australian governments for a long time. The Commonwealth government’s latest Initial Teacher Education (ITE) reform agenda appears to be motivated by responding to an apparent plateau in Australian primary and secondary school students’ performance in literacy, numeracy and science subjects in comparison with that of other developed nations. The Conversation noted that during the same reporting period, 1995–2015, “high-performing countries such as Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei and Japan made steady improvements, while other countries including Canada, England, Ireland, Northern Ireland and the US have improved and now outperform Australia”.2
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Assuming we agree that standardised testing scores a valuable measure of standards. Teaching education quality is only a small reason that standard test scores are falling in comparison to other western countries. If Australia is to continue to improve in these rankings there needs to be a continued push for the standardising the Australian curriculum. Once all teachers are teaching the same thing we will have a better platform to implement change.
Such as school funding and importantly funding fairly. There are large disparities between some schools and the current system does not allocate funds in a meaningful manner. For example private schools in some cases receive more funding than public schools, unless comparing a large student population disparity, rarely be the case.
Parents need to buy into reading and helping their kids with homework. Schools teach how to learn as much as what to learn. The practice of learning and reading is done at HOME not in the class room.
Finally, If you want to attract top talent you have to pay for it and teachers are notoriously underpaid.