Fast-tracked teacher training gets tick from federal government

“Very worrying.” As classrooms grow more chaotic, federal Education Minister Jason Clare is pushing to improve teacher training.

Teachers need better training to deal with chaotic classrooms. Photo: iStock

Bad behaviour in schools is “very worrying’’ and universities must train new teachers to deal with chaotic classrooms, federal Education Minister Jason Clare said on Friday.

“Teaching is such a tough job,’’ he told Today Extra.

“I don’t know if many of us really appreciate just how tough and hard and complex being a schoolteacher is.

“(I’m) looking at how we can better prepare teachers for the classroom while they’re still at university, giving them the skills they need so they’re ready to hit the ground running, teaching kids to read and write, but also to deal with classroom behaviour.’’

A Teacher Education Expert Panel, chaired by University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott, this week called on universities to improve teacher training to focus more on teaching children to read and write, and to manage increasingly disruptive classrooms.

Mr Clare said he would push to bring more mature teachers into classrooms by cutting the time required for professionals such as accountants and lawyers to retrain as teachers.

His push to fast-track teacher training for degree-qualified professionals puts him at loggerheads with teachers’ unions.

Despite a crippling shortage of teachers, the Australian Education Union has vowed to “defend hard-won rigour in initial teacher education, including the two-year postgraduate master’s degree’’.

Mr Clare said shortening the retraining requirement and paying career-changers to work as teaching assistants while they study part-time would encourage “more people in their 30s or 40s to want to become a schoolteacher’’.

“If you’ve got a mortgage and kids, you can’t easily take two years out of the workforce,’’ the minister said.

“We’re looking at ways to maintain the (educational) standard, compact the course, spend more time in the classroom and pay people while they learn, so that we can get more people who are engineers or lawyers or scientists or whatever else to think about becoming a schoolteacher.’’

Mr Clare said the federal government would provide 5000 scholarships next year for school leavers with ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admission Rank) scores above 80 to enrol in education degrees.

“If we encourage more of our best and brightest to become a teacher, I think that’s a good thing,’’ he said.