Leaving school bottom of class no basis for teaching

The revelation that universities made offers to year 12 graduates with an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank below 50 – the bottom 10 per cent of high school graduates – for 221 different bachelor degrees this year points to the need for major reform of education and training. At a time of serious skills and labour shortages it is critical to recognise that not every student who applies to enter university belongs there.

Depending on their strengths and interests, many who struggled at school and failed a fair proportion of their chosen subjects would be better off and better paid, including in the long term, in pursuing vocational education, apprenticeships and workforce opportunities. More than 13,000 students with an ATAR below 50 applied for university last year, with 55 per cent accepted. The issue needs to be discussed at the Albanese government’s Jobs and Skills Summit in a few weeks. There, advice from industry on alternative options for students not well suited to academic work should be useful. Tough as it is for the struggling students concerned, the Morrison government’s Job-Ready Graduates legislation, which specifies that university students who fail 50 per cent of their course in any year have to pay full fees, has merit. It should turn the minds of students unsuited to their chosen courses to consider other options.

The problem ranges across professional degree courses in business and accounting, engineering, architecture, nursing, psychology and, most problematic, teaching. It is a contributing factor to high university dropout rates, which are a waste of the university sector’s, taxpayers’ and students’ resources, and students’ time. In fields such as accounting, engineering and architecture, the students will find their own level when they come up against the harder subjects in those courses and, if they get through, as they work in those professions.

But the fact aspiring teachers can access seven different education degrees with ATAR scores below 50 points to the need for a clean-out of current structures to reduce the chances of mediocrity being entrenched in classrooms. Parents and anyone else with a smidgen of common sense – but not education authorities, apparently – know that those who struggled badly at school are not the best people to instil in children and teenagers the basics of literacy and numeracy, intellectual curiosity about the wonders of science, an appreciation of literature or a fascination with history.

The Weekend Australian agrees with Australian Education Union president Correna Haythorpe, who warned that students with an ATAR lower than 70 are likely to fail a teaching degree. Low entry scores for teaching degrees are a growing concern, she says. It is a sign of the glacial pace of education reform that it is nine years since Ms Haythorpe’s predecessor, Angelo Gavrielatos, told this newspaper that capping university teaching places or setting a minimum ATAR entry standard would be good policy. As we said then: “Insisting on better quality applicants is at odds with the Gillard government’s removal of the cap on subsidised university places, which has effectively allowed universities to enrol as many students as possible.” The plethora of teaching courses in all states, in city and regional universities competing for students to fill a virtually unlimited number of government-subsidised places, we said then, had stretched academic expertise thinly.

However unpopular with unions, merit pay rewarding high-performing teachers and those who obtain extra qualifications such as master’s degrees or doctorates in their subject fields is important in building the teaching workforce and lifting quality. So is recruiting well-paid, highly qualified outsiders, provided they can teach. As in other professions, a floor under entry standards for teaching degrees should be a basic starting point.