Learning curve ramps up on road to better school results
The road to improved school results begins with improved teacher training.
Our collective response to each round of backsliding or stagnant school test results has become as predictable as super mare Winx crossing the finish line ahead of her rivals, even if it is a heart-stopping squeak past the post.
Every time domestic and international assessments reveal our students to be trailing the international pack, the disappointment is greeted with the same cries for more money, a fresh outbreak in the national pastime of teacher bashing and calls to improve the quality of teacher training.
“When you send your kids to an Australian school, effective teaching should be a certainty, not a lottery,” says Lisa Rodgers, head of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership.
Our national reaction to the release of the National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy results this month was no different. Despite a few green shoots, overall student writing skills have slipped backwards in the past six years while other key literacy and numeracy skills have stalled.
NAPLAN is a national snapshot of student ability in years 3, 5, 7 and 9, and since its inception in 2008 it has helped exposed faltering academic standards.
Two years ago a federal government-appointed collection of education experts, the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group, released a road map for significantly improving Australia’s teacher education courses.
AITSL was tasked with driving the overhaul. Rodgers, who has been at the helm of the federal government body since October last year, likens the process to turning around a supertanker. While progress may be slow and steady, they are inching forward.
“Australia is in great shape in terms of teaching and school leadership, it’s got its problems, but it’s on its way. We’re doing the right things,’’ she tells Inquirer in her first major interview.
The title of the TEMAG report, Action Now: Classroom Ready Teachers, highlighted the depth of the problem: some teaching graduates were walking out of university gates and into classrooms clueless. The dilemma was far more complex than a few headlines generated around some students being accepted into teaching courses with an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank below 50 per cent of the Year 12 student population.
While the political landscape during the past 12 months has been dominated by Gonski 2.0 — the at times fraught and heated process of ushering in revamped $23.5 billion worth of additional needs-based school funding arrangements from January 1 next year — the implementation process for the teacher education reforms has resembled the proverbial duck paddling furiously beneath the water’s surface.
“We have to keep going on with them (the reforms) and I think they’ll be mission critical to esteeming the profession because fundamentally what it will do is lift the quality bar and it’ll also make the selection far more rigorous,” says Rodgers. “The sense of the profession will change but it’s going to be a slow burn.”
Some education providers have welcomed the changes; others have not. Rodgers wagers the reforms will be implemented by 2021. “We will get to a point where we will be selecting students into ITE (initial teacher education courses) based on their academic and non-academic capabilities,” she says. “There will be rigorous candidate selection. There will be rigorous processes around the courses that are being delivered to those candidates.
“There will be rigorous assessment at the end of the course and people will not only have to pass the literacy and numeracy standards but they’ll have to demonstrate they are classroom ready.
“And if you’re a primary teacher you’ll have to walk out with a primary specialisation; for example, in reading, mathematics or science. That’s fundamentally different to what we’ve got now,” Rodgers adds.
AITSL is overseeing the process of national standards for the accreditation of ITE courses that centres on providers demonstrating their programs ensure pre-service teachers have the knowledge and skills they need to be successful in the classroom by the time they graduate. Teaching graduates also need to show their literacy and numeracy skills are in the top 30 per cent of the adult population before they are allowed in the classrooms.
Earlier this year, The Australian revealed nearly one in 20 universities undertaking teaching degrees needed remedial work to help them pass the basic literacy and adult tests. The first full year of results showed 95 per cent of about 13,000 students last year were up to scratch and could be green-lit to teach the nation’s children.
Teaching students at 54 higher education institutions have three attempts to pass the test. If they fail at their first attempt, universities work with students to get them up to speed. Last year more than 600 students resat the online test on one or more occasions.
The new accreditation standards for initial teacher education courses also mean providers have to describe their rationale for how they select students, the mechanisms used, how threshold entry scores are applied and whether there have been any exemptions. Institutions need to ensure the students entering teaching degrees have the right mix of academic and personal qualities so they can succeed in the classrooms.
NSW requires its students entering undergraduate teaching degrees to be drawn from the top 30 per cent of high school graduates. They need to achieve three band 5 outcomes in their Higher School Certificate, including in English.
Victoria also will draw from the top 30 per cent by introducing a minimum ATAR for Year 12 entry into undergraduate courses to 70 from 2019, starting at 65 next year.
But less than 30 per cent of students who are offered tertiary places for education are selected based on their ATARs.
The federal Department of Education and Training warns that having an ATAR doesn’t mean it is the selection process used and different admission criteria can be used, such as interviews, written applications and prior academic performances.
In the past few years there has been less reliance on an ATAR for education courses. Federal higher education data for university share of offers by ATAR shows that last year there were 867 students, or 3.7 per cent, with an ATAR of 50 per cent or less, but 17,169 students or 72.4 per cent were offered a place without an ATAR. A year earlier, the non-ATAR group was 54.4 per cent and there were 5.5 per cent of students with an ATAR of 50 per cent or less.
“We’ve got to attract talented students who are committed to the profession and we’ve got to prepare them effectively,” Rodgers says. “Now I’m not saying we recruit the brightest. We need to get the brightest and the best, and we need to clarify what the best looks like. That’s not only about a high ATAR score.”
Rodgers says each year there are about 30,000 students nationwide enrolled in initial teacher education courses and roughly 18,000 go on to graduate each year. About 11,000 find work in classrooms after graduation, and there is some evidence that as few as 6000 say they intend to stay in the profession after five to six years.
Few educators and policymakers dispute the need for improved workforce planning. Academic powerhouses Singapore and Finland — nations with test scores that routinely dwarf Australian results in the triennial Program for International Student Assessment conducted by the OECD — train only the number and type of teachers they need.
“They invest heavily in these teachers and their workforce, and they got strong control in terms of their workforce planning,” Rodgers says. They not only take their teaching students from the top to the middle of the pack, the selection process is based on the attributes of what makes good teachers, including values.
From next year, each Australian student will need to pass a teacher performance assessment that is designed to reflect the abilities they need to teach in a classroom at the graduate stage of their career. Combined with the professional standards for teachers and principals now in place and overseen by AITSL, this is helping to lift not only the quality of teaching and school leadership but, importantly, also how the profession is viewed in the community.
Valuing the role of teachers and principals is an important cog in retaining teaching staff but also encouraging the best students to enter the profession.
Australia, Rodgers, says “is the one country I think in the world that has prioritised teaching of school leadership to the point they have a company that is solely focused on that”.
AITSL’s website provides teachers and principals with a raft of resources including self-assessment tools. “We work hand-in-glove with the profession, so we’ve got the teaching and principal standards, and that’s really quite a milestone,” Rodgers says. “Also, it’s a really important set of criteria as to what effective teaching looks like at every career stage, and of course we’ve also got that in terms of the school leaders.”
The Australian Professional Standards for Teachers have been adopted as the national approach for teacher registration, with each state and territory having responsibility for implementing the uniform approach.
Reflecting from a personal perspective on her arrival in Australia last year, Rodgers, who was deputy secretary, early learning and student achievement in New Zealand’s Ministry of Education, says the thing that struck her quite hard when she walked into the country was the focus on investment.
“Now you couldn’t have missed the Gonski discussion, but the initial discussions really were around how much,” Rodgers says.
“When you look at the evidence base around investment and education, there is a relationship between investment and educational achievement, but it gets to a point where there is no relationship at all.” She says Australia reached that point several years ago and more money is not going to make a difference. “The thing that strikes me is we really need to focus on the return we get on that investment and where we invest, and we need to get quite savvy about that and that’s at a system level, and we’ve gone so far as we’re investing in teaching and leadership, for example.”
Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham tells Inquirer: “You can’t run schools without the right levels of resourcing and funding obviously, but that focus on funding has been an enormous distraction from the critical main game of how to make the greatest difference to the lives of students in the classroom.
“Calls to improve teacher training and teaching quality have not fallen on deaf ears.
“It’s clear that the biggest impact within a school comes from teachers. When we came to government in 2013 one of the key priorities we identified was the need to make sure new teachers were better prepared when they started their careers.”
The TEMAG report identified the most effective way governments could help build better teaching capabilities, particularly among new graduates.
“While much of the public focus has been on funding, alongside AITSL we’ve been working to strengthen the accreditation standards of teacher training courses, ensure graduate teachers have literacy and numeracy skills among the top 30 per cent of the adult population, and implement new standards to recognise our most highly accomplished and lead teachers,” Birmingham says.
QUALITY TEACHING CHANGES
hNew national standards for the accreditation of initial teacher education programs with all tertiary ITE courses now accredited.
hUniversities providing ITE courses must demonstrate their graduates will have the knowledge and skills they need to be successful in the classroom.
hThis includes ensuring ITE students gain classroom experience.
hAssessing the readiness of graduates to teach with a new “teacher test”. This is designed to ensure new teachers have literacy and numeracy skills in the top 30 per cent of the adult population before they are allowed in a classroom.
hAssessing new teachers against the Graduate Standard.
hWidening the university selection process for ITE courses by including interviews or written applications so teaching students can demonstrate an aptitude and commitment to teaching, and getting rid of the fog and doublespeak around university entrance procedures and better defining Australian Tertiary Admission Rank thresholds.
hRecruitment targets for specialist teachers and requiring new primary teachers to graduate with a subject specialisation such as science, technology, engineering and maths subjects
hAustralian Professional Standards for Teachers and Principals introduced
hMinimum proportions of trainee teachers specialising in literacy and numeracy
hUse explicit literacy and numeracy instruction in all schools
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