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The LANTITE: holding our degrees hostage
Imagine you are at least halfway through your degree (93 per cent for me) and your university decides to spring on you that you now have to complete another hurdle before you are allowed to graduate. Not work. Graduate. Well that is exactly what universities, in collaboration with the government, have done to thousands of student teachers across the country.
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I am a student at the university of South Australia, Magill campus, I too have completed every part of my masters in teaching (primary) aside from the final placement, due to not hitting the benchmark for LANTITE after three attempts. The anxiety this has caused over the last 12 months has been indescribable. I have been seeing a counselor at the university who is also appalled over the implications of LANTITE. This article brings up a lot of unanswered questions and seeks to make sense of a senseless test. To me, this is a human rights issue, as a single parent/ full- student having worked my butt off over the last 3+ years to attain this degree, and to no avail. It demands a better approach to improving teacher quality. In my opinion, universities around Australia have been graduating quality teachers for decades, without useless money-grabbing government constraints.
Its basically ridiculous to assert not being able to speak English qualifies you to teach English… the reason he Lantite test was introduced was to address clear problems in education and training of certain students that went on to become dreadful teachers, engineers and more because the fee paying education system encouraged a diminution of standard to ensure income was maintained.
I was a communications student who studied at UniSA’s Magill Campus. I studied writing subjects with teaching students who could not follow instructions for assessments, let alone write with correct spelling, punctuation, syntax and grammar. I feel for Denise, but it seems she was herself let down in her own primary and secondary schooling if she cannot pass the LANTITE.
Australian universities cannot graduate quality teachers if they admit teaching students whom do not meet benchmarks for literacy and numeracy. How can we expect teachers to correctly teach literacy and numeracy skills to school children if they have not mastered those skills themselves?