Uni deans reject teacher reforms

DEANS of education have disputed the NSW government's claim they are feeding an oversupply of teachers across the nation.

DEANS of education yesterday disputed the NSW government's claim they are feeding an oversupply of teachers across the nation.

The Australian Council of Deans of Education also rejected the use of tertiary entrance scores as too crude a measure for identifying the best candidates for teaching.

Council president Toni Downes said there was a tension between the federal government's policy to have 40 per cent of the population attend university and the demand from different disciplines to enrol the top students.

"Do you want the best and the brightest to be looking after your mother as she ages; do you want the best and brightest solving your legal problems, being your accountant, the teacher of your children? The answer is yes to all of them," she said.

Professor Downes said non-government school systems never complained about the quality of their teachers, and said state governments should look at their recruitment of new teachers, which basically placed all graduates in a queue instead of picking the most able.

The deans were responding to the state's blueprint for overhauling teacher education and qualifications, which was released yesterday. It proposes raising entry scores into teaching, limiting the number of places in teaching degrees, and requiring aspiring teachers to study maths, science and/or a language as well as English to qualify for entry.

However, a former dean of education in two universities and now an international education consultant, Brian Caldwell, said the reforms proposed by the NSW government required urgent attention to lift the quality of teaching and should be rolled out nationally.

Professor Caldwell said the reforms were required urgently, and lifting the entry score into teaching was an immediate first step that should be taken.

He drew up a similar set of reforms for the Queensland government in 2010, a report that is being considered by the new Liberal National Party government.

Professor Caldwell said in Queensland students with relatively low academic capacity were being admitted to teaching courses, where universities would pass about 95 per cent of them into a situation that was more intellectually demanding than even 10 years ago, and where only a small minority of teachers find permanent jobs.

The NSW government says universities graduate 5500 new teachers each year, with the state's public school system, the biggest employer of teachers, hiring only 300 to 500 of them.

Professor Caldwell's report found that Queensland universities graduated about 3000 students in 2010, of which about a third found permanent jobs.