Longitudinal Teacher Education and Workforce Study (ltews) Final Report

Teacher Education Relevance and Effectiveness

As the 2007 McKinsey Report (Barber & Mourshed, 2007) highlighted, the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. In the pursuit of a high quality teaching workforce in Australia, teacher education has been the subject of changing state and federal policy reforms informed by more than 100 inquiries of various types into teacher education since 1979 (e.g. Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2013; Caldwell & Sutton, 2010; Committee for the Review of Teaching and Teacher Education, 2003; Education and Training Committee, 2005; House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Vocational Training, 2007; Productivity Commission, 2012; Ramsey, 2000). Indeed, as Linda Darling-Hammond (2000) concluded in her review of 50 states in the USA, teacher preparation and development is critical to improving teacher quality.

Entry into the profession and ongoing registration of those in the profession has traditionally been the responsibility of the states and territories and the eight teacher registration authorities – the Queensland College of Teachers, the New South Wales Institute of Teachers, the Victorian Institute of Teaching, the Teachers Registration Board Tasmania, the Teachers Registration Board of South Australia, the Western Australian College of Teaching and the Northern Territory Teachers Registration Board and the recently established Australian Capital Territory Teacher Quality Institute. They aim to ensure quality teacher education programs and this quality beginning teachers entering the workforce. Recently, new processes for accrediting initial teacher education programs (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2011b) were endorsed. Program accreditation will continue to be undertaken by the relevant state and territory authorities, however they will now do this using the new national graduate teacher standards and program standards, and using the endorsed national accreditation processes.

A significant feature of the current landscape is the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership, 2011c). These comprise seven standards that describe what teachers should know and be able to do at four professional stages of a teaching career – Graduate, Proficient, Highly Accomplished and Lead. They are grouped into three domains of teaching – Professional Knowledge, Professional Practice and Professional Engagement.

Domains of teaching	Standards
Professional Knowledge	Know students and how they learn
	Know the content and how to teach it
Professional Practice	Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning
	Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments
	Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning
Professional Engagement	Engage in professional learning
	Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community

The new program standards and new professional standards have begun to be used by state and territory teacher regulatory authorities in accrediting teacher education programs from 2013 onwards. This means that, although these new professional standards for teachers provide a relevant frame of reference for judging the capacity of the 2011 graduating cohort, they did not determine the nature and scope of their teacher education programs. Their teacher education programs would have been developed and accredited before the new standards were developed and enacted. That said, the categories associated with the new Australian Professional Standards for Teachers did inform the surveys, as requested by the management group for LTEWS.

The seven Australian Professional Standards for Teachers were added to the Graduate Teacher Survey and Principal Survey which already included questions related to curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, classroom management, teaching culturally, linguistically and socio-economically diverse learners, professional ethics, collegiality, engagement in ongoing professional learning, and engagement with parents and local community. These were the themes that had emerged from an extensive review of the research literature conducted as part of the SETE study. For the LTEWS study, the analysis focussed on the seven Australian Professional Standards and three other specified areas: (i) Teaching culturally, linguistically and socio-economically diverse learners, (ii) Use of ICT and (iii) Literacy and numeracy.

Chapter 4 first includes a summary of the main findings from the mapping of initial teacher education component of LTEWS which was undertaken to understand the programs the 2011 graduate cohort would have completed. The full report is available in Appendix 1. The second section examines teacher education programs and graduates’ decisions about teaching employment. Aspects of deciding entry into teacher preparation are then discussed. The final sections of this chapter discuss the findings in relation to teacher education practicums, the subjects studied and also preparation to teach i) culturally, linguistically and socio-economically diverse learners, ii) ICT, and iii) numeracy and literacy.