Unis vow to fight teaching cut-off

A proposal to restrict enrolments in teacher education would be met with a constitutional challenge.

AMID growing concern that universities are enrolling too many ill-prepared students, 30,000 nationally are about to take their first steps towards becoming school teachers in one of the 272 undergraduate and 145 postgraduate courses on offer.

But a proposal expected to be tabled this week by NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli to restrict enrolments in teacher education would be met with a constitutional challenge.

Greg Craven, vice-chancellor of Australian Catholic University, said NSW was expected to propose that entry into teacher education courses be restricted to students in the top 20 per cent of the state in certain subjects, most likely English and maths.

The NSW government could force universities to accept such a proposal by limiting practicum placements in the state school system to those which signed up for the enrolment plan, he said.

"At least one university, maybe more, would highly likely mount a constitutional challenge," said Professor Craven. "It's a recipe for disaster, a recipe for policy chaos."

Professor Craven, who was crown counsel to Victorian premier Jeff Kennett in the 1990s, is considered one of Australia's leading constitutional experts.

He is also widely credited with having written much of the legislation covering the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency. He said the anticipated NSW proposal was inconsistent with that legislation, as well as another education bill currently before parliament.

Mr Piccoli has argued universities are churning out too many poor quality teachers.

He told The Australian in December that lower-scoring students would not be disqualified from teaching, but that they might have to take an arts or other specialist degree first to earn the marks to transfer into teaching. "We need to have a discussion about where we set the bar for teaching," he said.

"Anecdotally, I keep hearing that teachers come out of university, go into their first year and the feedback is the teacher should not have been passed, shouldn't have been registered."

Andy Vann, vice-chancellor of Charles Sturt University, which has one of the country's biggest education faculties, said it was widely held that the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank was an imperfect predictor of success at university.

It was highly correlated to wealth and privilege - the rich got higher ATARs while poorer students, those in rural and regional areas, indigenous people and the first in the family to study at university generally got lower ATARs.

"There are a lot of issues that play out in Year 12 that may or may not predict success at university," Professor Vann said.

"Using ATAR is cheap and easy. But higher education policy has moved into looking for much higher participation. That inevitably causes a drop in ATAR."

Using ATARs as a gatekeeper to university entry was also proposed in a letter to several federal politicians from the Group of Eight last October.

"Introducing a minimum ATAR cut-off of 60 for all fields to Year 12 school leavers, with a bachelor of education cut-off of 70, could save upwards of $1 billion by 2017 if implementation commenced in 2013," the letter says. "Limiting commonwealth-supported places for BEd students with ATARs of 70 and above would save in excess of $100 million over the same period."

Fred Hilmer, chairman of the Group of Eight, said the proposal was written in light of cuts of $1bn a year over four years. "It was written in the context of if there needed to be budget cuts, there may be other ways of doing it that would be less harmful to the sector," he said. "We were also mindful that the Gonski review and various states were talking about imposing ATAR cut-offs."

He said the proposal was balanced by the call for more pre-bachelors and pathways programs to deal with students who did not qualify.