ALP: get smarter about ‘dumbing down’ of teaching

Labor has announced plans to raise the bar on entry into teaching degrees in a bid to stop the “dumbing down” of the teaching profession.

Acting Opposition Leader Tanya Plibersek, in Rosebery yesterday to announce Labor’s plan to get the best and brightest Australians to study teaching. Picture: Hollie Adams

Universities will be barred from ­allowing low-scoring high school students entry into teaching ­degrees under Labor to put an end to the “dumbing down” of the teaching profession, Tanya Plibersek says.

Unveiling Labor’s teachers plan yesterday, the Acting Opposition Leader said there had been such an alarming slide in ATAR scores required for teaching courses in recent years that universities were turning teaching into a last-resort option for underachievers. “We cannot afford to continually dumb-down teaching degrees to enrol people who will never be competent teachers,” she said. “What we don’t want is ­people who just don’t know what else to do with their lives thinking it might be a good fallback.”

Josh Frydenberg dismissed Labor’s pitch, saying teachers ­already had to meet mandatory literacy and numeracy standards to ensure they were in the “top 30 per cent” of the population prior to graduation.

“It’s a bit rich of the Labor Party to be putting this forward after it was the Labor Party and their mates in the union movement who have fought the Coalition every step of the way as we have sought to lift the standards for teachers,” the Treasurer said yesterday. “We have more rigorous ­assessment for the accreditation of teachers including demonstrated participation in the classrooms.”

Universities have been repeatedly criticised for allowing low-scoring students into education degrees — some with ATAR scores below 20.

Despite higher published cut-off score requirements for teaching degrees, universities routinely offer bonus points to students for a range of reasons, including ­mature age entry or social ­disadvantage.

In 2015, more than half the students offered places in teaching degrees in NSW and the ACT had scored in the bottom 50 per cent of school leavers.

This was despite a directive by the NSW government two years earlier that it would no longer employ teacher graduates who did not get a band five (distinction equivalent) result in at least three of their HSC subjects.

Last year, the Victorian government also imposed a new benchmark, employing only teacher graduates who scored an ATAR above 65. That has been lifted to 70 this year.

Ms Plibersek said Labor would put a stop to this “very worrying trend”. Future teachers, she said, would need to be drawn from the top 30 per cent of academic achievers.

Unless universities lifted entry requirements towards an ATAR score of 80 or above, a Labor government would cap places in teaching degrees to make them more competitive.

Over the past 15 years, there has been a steady decline in the literacy and numeracy performance of Australian students, as measured by the Program for Inter­national Student Assessment (PISA).

Emeritus professor Steven Schwartz, the former chairman of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, said imposing a minimum ATAR for entry into teaching degrees could end the current “cycle of low performance breeding low performance”.

“Over the last few decades, Australian outcomes have gone down not just relative to other countries but also relative to ourselves,” Professor Schwartz said.

“The quality of teachers is probably the most important ingredient in producing learning in students. Anything that improves the quality of teachers will undoubtedly increase student outcomes and performance.”

Universities Australia’s chief executive Catriona Jackson yesterday warned against relying too heavily on ATAR scores. “Universities use a number of diverse ways to assess a student’s ability to succeed,” she said.

Additional reporting: Emily Ritchie