Classrooms need to be at centre of education reform

Education Minister Jason Clare’s first meeting with his state and territory counterparts in Canberra on Friday produced useful practical strategies to plug the nation’s crippling shortage of teachers. Performance-based pay rises to keep top teachers in classrooms will be especially important, provided an effective model is found to determine how to reward the best teachers, not just those who are the longest-serving. Paid internships for university students to work in schools also has potential to improve the quality of classroom education. Fast-tracking visas to allow foreign teachers to move to Australia should prove worthwhile, assuming the newcomers are up to the challenge. It is important to note, however, that Britain and other nations are also short of good teachers.

Reforming teacher education is vital, which is why the plans to punish universities with high dropout rates and incorporate more maths and literacy lessons into education degrees to prepare teaching graduates for classroom work have merit. Current teachers, many of whom complain about administration and other duties encroaching on their time, will welcome the meeting’s decision that teachers should be freed up to do what matters – teach.

Mr Clare, who has an honours degree in arts and a law degree from the University of NSW, has brought fresh eyes to a sector that has become bogged down in problems in recent decades under governments of both persuasions. Those problems are about far more than funding. The minister was right when he said something was wrong when half the university students who enrolled in education degrees failed to finish, compared with a dropout rate of 30 per cent in other degrees. If 60 per cent of enrolled students finished their degrees it would go a long way to fixing the teacher shortage. A Universities Australia proposal to adopt an apprentice-based model, combining theory with on-the-job training, was well received. It makes sense, as Mr Clare said, for first-year undergraduates to be embedded in classrooms “right off the bat” for practical training and gaining experience in behaviour management. Working as paid interns would help final-year students determine if they wanted to teach for the right reasons.

After two decades of worthwhile reforms such as NAPLAN, creation and refinement of the national curriculum, Gonski funding, literacy and STEM programs, it is alarming that education decline continues. As reported in Inquirer, assessment by the OECD in 2000 showed 12 per cent of 15-year-old Australian students were “low performers”, with literacy skills “too low to enable them to participate effectively and productively in life”. By 2018 it was 20 per cent. The key, write Ben Jensen and Mailie Ross of research group Learning First, is: What happens in classrooms? What is taught? How is it taught? How is learning assessed? High-performing systems overseas, they note, focus on classrooms.

Professional development in Australia is general rather than focused on how to teach specific topics – such as reflection and refraction of light in year 5 science, for example. In Singapore, in contrast, teams of expert academics and teachers work in classrooms, with teachers, looking at what is working well, where students are having problems and what experiments or resources need to be improved. Mr Clare, the authors argue, will “quickly learn that when it comes to what actually matters in education, he has no line of sight at all”. As well as improving teacher training, Mr Clare and state ministers should turn their attention to what is working, or not working, grade by grade, subject by subject and topic by topic inside the nation’s classrooms.