Teacher Training Problems.
Teacher colleges largely disappeared in Australia during the late 1970s and 1980s, with most being amalgamated into universities or Colleges of Advanced Education (CAEs) by the end of 1990. The Shift to Universities involved merging specialised teacher training institutions into larger, multi-purpose universities or CAEs to upgrade qualifications from certificates/diplomas to bachelor's degrees. The supposed reasons for the change were part of broader reforms to higher education, aiming to raise the academic standards of teacher training. By the early 1990s, the era of standalone, single-purpose teacher training colleges in Australia had effectively ended and from that point onward the teaching profession was subject to the neo-liberal ethos of the Global Education Reform Movement.
Known now as the Dawkins Revolution, instituted by the then Labor Education Minister John Dawkins(1987–91), it merged higher education providers, granted university status to a variety of institutions, instituted a system for income contingent loans to finance student fees, required a range of new performance monitoring techniques and methods, and revamped the relationship between universities and the Commonwealth Government. The reforms transitioned Australia's higher education system into a mass system which could produce more university educated workers, but have remained controversial due to their impacts on the incentives facing universities, bureaucracies and academics.
The current teacher shortage situation across the nation is testimony to the failure of the Dawkins Revolution which has resulted in the feminisation of the profession, 84% of primary school teachers now being female, 68% in secondary schools, and both rising rapidly. This alone is a great disadvantage to our nation’s children, an increasing number every year having no male role model in their lives before commencing school, and often very little thereafter The gross shortage of Practical Teaching experiences has become so truncated that the government in 2026 has had to step in and offer financial support for Paid Prac to enable trainee teachers to be able to afford hands on teaching time in real classrooms.
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If society deems that our doctors be trained in Medical Schools why don't we afford the same importance to the teaching profession and have our teachers trained in dedicated Education Schools, or as I have proposed "Academies of Excellence for Teacher Education"? When the training of teachers is relegated to a university degree, sometimes not even used to become a teacher, the whole foundation of the profession is compromised. Society as a whole has been conditioned to seeing teaching as something almost everyone can do, but Covid disproved that notion for many.
“The education of a nation’s children is the most important role that any of its citizens might embrace. It is the bedrock of society, the story of how the history, aspirations and dreams of a culture are created and how it might shape and enhance the future of the nation through the aspirations of its children, its leaders of tomorrow. Its teachers are the key to success. I have been told on good authority that many very suitable teacher trainee candidates, having experienced the current schooling model for twelve years have no incentive to pursue it as a career, as their lifetime passion. It has left them disillusioned as to why we do school now as we do." Bruce L Jones.
“Being a teacher is the most important job in the world, and we don’t have enough of them,” said Minister Clare. “I want more young people to leap out of high school and want to become a teacher, rather than a lawyer or a banker. That’s why we are tackling the teacher workforce shortage with teaching scholarships, reforms to teacher training and paid prac for teaching students.”
Whilst Minister Clare can declare such when speaking about teachers yet insists that the current education model is the only acceptable model for the next decade there is a mighty mismatch. When the Federal Government had to introduce the LANTITE (Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education) in 2016 to ensure literacy and numeracy standards for trainees were adequate to be able to teach surely alarm bells should have been ringing across the nation. It is even worse as time has passed as struggling new recruits are now given five chances of passing the test, if not then being deemed as unsuitable for fulfilling the most important task in the nation, teaching.
Universities are most reluctant to have trainee teachers fail and the forty eight bodies so charged with that responsibility have themselves failed, much to the shame of the nation. The teacher training courses are so light on in some universities that the time for Practical Hands-on Teaching, Prac, is not seen as important as in the past. The variation of teaching degrees across the nation's universities so charged with the task in itself creates great anomalies in what it is that makes great teacher. Students who wish to are able to study for two degrees at the same time, great for university income, fatal for the teaching profession. How can it be seen as best practice when a student living in Cairns can enrol in a West Australian University to gain an Education Degree?
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To add to all of that the cohort of mainly female applicants for teacher training continues to suffer the denigrating public opinion generated in the words of George Bernard Shaw "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." His words implied teaching is a backup career and tragically for so many when their first second and even third preferences are not possible teaching is the fallback career. “At least the holidays are good.” However, the original sentiment often cited by Aristotle is generally overlooked and it emphasises that teaching requires a specialised skill in communication, not a lack of ability - "Those who can, do; those who understand, teach."
I give the final words to a past acting Federal Education Minister, Stuart Robert, who told a meeting of private school heads that the cause of the falling education standards across the nation was due to the the dud teachers in the public school system. Read the whole article here: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/mar/17/stuart-robert-says-dud-teachers-not-an-issue-in-australias-independent-schools
Little wonder that Parent Choice, the privatisation of the nation’s education system, got such a boost and has blossomed so markedly in recent years. A new model for the training of our nation's teachers is urgently needed. Maybe Academies of Excellence for Teacher Education, AETEs, would fit the bill.
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