Better teacher recruitment will help lift standards

As problems go, this one does not need rocket science to fix. A good calculator and a dollop of common sense should do nicely. Australia’s well paid education authorities and university leaders are allowing tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars to be wasted training teachers who will never enter a classroom. On Saturday, Stefanie Balogh revealed that the mismatch between the supply and demand for new teachers was now so wide that fewer than half of new education graduates were working full-time in schools. The situation is unfair to graduates, who leave university with HECS debts of at least $20,000. It is also short changing taxpayers at a time of acute budgetary pressures. Nor is it improving Australia’s lacklustre education performance. And despite the oversupply of general subjects teachers, many schools are struggling to find well qualified maths/science specialists, especially at secondary level. That imbalance also needs to be addressed through recruitment processes for undergraduate and postgraduate teaching courses.

It would be logical if the shortage of teaching jobs prompted universities to increase cut-offs for enrolments in teaching degrees. That, unfortunately, is not the case. Education Department figures show 861 offers of places in university education courses were made this year to applicants with Australian Tertiary Admissions Ranks of just 50 or worse. At the opposite end of the spectrum, however, it is encouraging that the newly released Teacher Education: Data Report 2017 shows about 3000 more postgraduate qualified teachers are entering the system every year than a decade ago.

NSW has set a minimum ATAR standard of 70 and Victoria is following suit. But as NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes says, applicants with lower ATARs are enrolling in interstate-based degrees to get around the state’s benchmarks. In the interests of students, regardless of where they live, all states and territories should implement the same rigorous benchmarks as NSW, and also adopt its pre-teaching literacy and numeracy requirements.

Paul Browning, the principal of St Paul’s School in Brisbane, identified the underlying cause of the problem on Saturday when he said teaching courses were “easy money’’ for universities to fill places to raise money to support more expensive courses and research. Five years ago The Australian warned that the Gillard government’s policy of uncapping subsidised university places to boost student numbers would encourage more entrants with low ATARs to enter degree courses, including teaching, putting school classroom standards at further risk.

While supply of teaching graduates outstrips demand, only capable applicants, well suited to the profession, should be admitted — not just on the basis of academic results but through a selection system to determine their suitability. Recruitment processes for medical students recognise that trainee doctors must be suited to a medical career as well as academically capable. Selecting teachers is no less important.