Longitudinal Teacher Education and Workforce Study (ltews) Final Report

Introduction

Teacher education quality has become a hallmark of education reforms in many countries around the world (Schleicher, 2011). The Global Education Reform Movement (Sahlberg, 2011) recognizes a key role of teachers in improving outcomes for children and young people in the increasingly competitive and globalized world. The reforms seek to create world-class education systems in which the quality of student learning would essentially rest on the quality of teachers. Recognizing the relationship between teaching quality and learning excellence, teacher preparation and its effectiveness have received an unprecedented attention both from policy-makers and educational researchers in the last two decades (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005). In particular, policy-makers have concentrated on policy settings in order to improve the preparation of graduate teachers, as well as increasing the productivity of the existing teaching workforce and its participation in educational reforms (Schleicher, 2011). Educational researchers, in their turn, have focused on how teachers learn and develop and on how effectively education programs can enable teachers to acquire the professional knowledge, skills and dispositions that allow them to succeed.

As a result of the cooperation between policy-makers and educational researchers, numerous international reports on teacher education and effective teaching practices have been published (Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD), 2005, 2009). Other reports and reviews have covered various aspects of teacher preparation programs and their effects on the quality of the teaching workforce (D. Boyd, Grossman, Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2006; Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Darling-Hammond et al., 2005; Grossman, 2005; Wilson, Floden, & Ferrini-Mundy, 2001). This international research has provided some answers to the pressing questions about initial teacher education, examining relationships between teacher attributes and student outcomes (D. Boyd, Lankford, Loeb, Rockoff, & Wyckoff, 2008; Darling-Hammond, 2009; Rivkin & Hanushek, 2005). This type of inquiry has also revealed that it is not possible to investigate issues about the value and effectiveness of teacher preparation without conceptualising it within a ‘learning to teach’ continuum and the prospect of ongoing professional growth. For example, the longitudinal study by Brouwer and Korthagen (2005) demonstrated that variables relating to school context had a larger impact on the formation of new teachers than the program effects. In the UK, the Becoming a Teacher (BaT) study (Hobson et al., 2009), a six-year longitudinal research project (2003-2009), similarly found the crucial importance of the school context with respect to the graduates’ capacity to engage in ongoing professional learning.

In this regard, international research into teacher education has demonstrated that there is no clear consensus on how best to prepare graduate teachers for work. It appears that the determinants of teacher quality should be perceived relationally. That is, the effectiveness of beginning teachers should be linked to their employment conditions and teacher preparation should be connected to other determinants of teaching quality such as improved recruitment and incentive structures, making teaching a more attractive profession, better in-service teacher development and career progression (Schleicher, 2011). From this perspective, the quality of teaching is considered as the relationship between teacher education and teacher productivity or as a nexus between the teacher experiences of professional learning and the conditions of their work in schools.

Reflecting international debates about the utility of teacher education, the quality of initial teacher preparation in Australia is a matter of ongoing concern. There have been more than 100 government inquiries of various types into teacher education since 1979 (e.g. Caldwell & Sutton, 2010; Education and Training Committee, 2005; House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Vocational Training, 2007; Productivity Commission, 2012; Ramsey, 2000). More than 400 teacher education programs are currently offered across Australia, graduating about 17,000 teachers each year. Eighty-one per cent of all the programs are offered in public universities. Recently, some private institutions as well as some state funded institutions of further education have been accredited to offer teacher preparation – often in early childhood education. Teachers are prepared in multiple study pathways including: (i) four-year undergraduate Bachelor of Education degrees, (ii) four-year double degrees comprising a degree in the subject discipline area and a degree in education, and (iii) one-year Graduate Diploma in Education or two-year Master of Teaching degrees after an initial three-year bachelor’s degree in a discipline other than education. From 2013, all graduate teacher education programs must be two years in length in order to be accredited (Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership, 2011a). Most pre-service teachers are ‘Commonwealth supported’ under the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS).

Initial teacher education programs aim to prepare teachers with the knowledge and skills to begin teaching in today’s rapidly changing contexts. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Report (OECD), Preparing Teachers and Developing Leaders, highlights what it takes to be teacher:

… the kind of education needed today requires teachers to be high-level knowledge workers who constantly advance their own professional knowledge as well as that of their profession. Teachers need to be agents of innovation not least because innovation is critically important for generating new sources of growth through improved efficiency and productivity. This is also true in the education sector, where innovation applied to both curricula and teaching methods can help to improve learning outcomes and prepare students for the rapidly changing demands of the 21st-century labour market. (Schleicher 2012, p.36)

In the pursuit of a high quality teaching workforce, teacher education has been the subject of changing state and federal policy reforms. The Australian Government’s Smarter Schools – Improving Teacher Quality National Partnership (TQNP) program provided $550 million over five years to drive a broad range of agendas designed to improve the quality of teaching and teacher education, including:

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  attracting the best graduates to teaching through additional pathways into teaching;
  
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  improving the quality and consistency of teacher training in partnership with universities;
  
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  developing the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers to promote excellence in the profession, including requirements for teachers to have knowledge and understanding of the learning needs of Indigenous students;
  
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  national consistency in the registration of teachers to support improved mobility in the teaching workforce;
  
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  developing and enhancing the skills and knowledge of teachers and school leaders through improved performance management and professional learning;
  
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  increasing retention through improved in-school support and rewarding quality teachers and school leaders in rural/remote and hard-to-staff schools; and,
  
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  improving the quality and availability of teacher workforce data.
  

The TQNP reform agenda has so far resulted in the introduction of alternative or employment based pathways into teaching such as Teach for Australia and Teach Next, and the establishment School Centres for Teaching Excellence (SCTE). In addition, the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) has been established as a national agency with responsibility for developing and implementing Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership, 2011c) and principals (Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership, 2011b), and for regulating national accreditation of teacher education programs and teacher registration (Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership, 2011a).