Acting federal Education Minister Stuart Robert has blamed “dud teachers” for the decline in the academic results of Australian students while praising independent schools for employing only quality teachers and delivering a model example of education.
In a speech to an independent schools conference on Thursday, Mr Robert criticised a “bottom 10 per cent of teachers” who “can’t read and write” as a key reason for Australia’s plummeting performance in the international education benchmark tests.
Acting Education Minister Stuart Robert has unleashed on “dud teachers” who he says are to blame for Australian students’ declining academic performance. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“The point being, if we can take the bottom 10 per cent of quality of teachers and turn them into the average quality within the teaching profession, we will arrest the decline,” Mr Robert said.
“The problem is the protection of teachers that don’t want to be there; that aren’t up to the right standard; that are graduating from university or have been for the last 10 years and they can’t read and write.”
But he reassured the heads of independent schools that his assessment of teacher quality issues did not apply to them, prompting the Australian Education Union to call his remarks an attack on public school teachers.
“I don’t think it’s a problem in your schools because frankly, you can hire and fire your own teachers. I’m talking to the heads of your schools here, and there’s no way they will accept a dud teacher in their school, like, not for a second,” Mr Robert said.
“You don’t have the bottom 10 per cent of teachers dragging the chain. But for every teacher you don’t have in your organisation, guess where they go?”
He noted Australia’s long-term decline in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tests 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science in more than 80 countries. Over the past 20 years, Australian PISA results have dropped from fourth to 16th in reading, eighth to 17th in science and 11th to 29th in maths.
Australian Education Union president Correna Haythorpe said Mr Robert had slandered the public school workforce.
“Public school teachers have always been an easy target for politicians like Minister Robert who think that a cheap and easy headline, which attacks teachers for declining educational outcomes will let his government off the hook for their failure to prioritise public education,” she said.
Associate Professor Chandra Shah, from Monash University’s Centre for the Economics of Education and Training, said Mr Robert’s comments were ill-informed.
“What is beyond dispute is the disparity in total funding and resources available to schools across different sectors, which has the most impact on outcomes,” he said.
Victoria’s Education Minister James Merlino said “it’s a disgrace” to have his federal counterpart attacking government school teachers.
“Instead of obsessing about culture wars, the Commonwealth needs to do its fair share and fund the final 5 per cent of the Schooling Resource Standard for government schools, something it has consistently refused to do,” he said.
Mr Robert said the federal government would seek to lift teacher quality by exercising control over the content of university teaching courses, which he said would be linked to government funding. He told the forum he wanted to see the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education students (LANTITE) moved forward to the first week of the first year of education degrees.
“We can’t have teachers into the third or fourth year of [an education degree] and 10 per cent of them failing the LANTITE,” he said.
Professor Kim Beswick, the director of the Gonski Institute and head of the School of Education at the University of NSW (Sydney) said “every graduate from an initial teacher education program has passed the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education”.
“Negative rhetoric about teachers has the effect of deterring the best potential teachers,” she added.
The Morrison government has focused on teacher quality as key to improving student performance, with former minister Alan Tudge commissioning a review into “initial teacher education”.
The report, released last month, recommended the Commonwealth wield its financial power to force schools to teach phonics and dictate which university education faculties would be allowed to take the most teaching students.
Mr Robert praised the leaders of independent schools for settling a model of educational excellence and teacher quality, telling the forum the government wanted to “bottle” their success.
“If I could pick that up and play that across the nation, we would, we would rival Singapore and the PISA results and they’re second in the world in maths, science and reading.”
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