Top of the Class

Report on the inquiry into teacher education

Introduction

Teacher quality is on the agenda across the world. As part of their efforts to promote quality schooling, most jurisdictions in Australia have moved towards establishing processes of teacher registration and formal or informal processes of accreditation of teacher education courses. These developments are of major significance to teacher education.

The accreditation of teacher education courses, the registration of teachers and the development and implementation of professional standards for teaching are all important ways of providing assurance that teacher education courses are of a high quality. They have the potential to significantly contribute to the renewal and improvement of teacher education courses. They should also raise the status of the profession and increase community confidence in it.

Schooling in Australia would be better served by a more nationally integrated system. Registration as a teacher or accreditation of a teacher education course should ensure certain identifiable outcomes irrespective of the route taken to achieve those outcomes or the location. In the committee’s view, much would be gained by integrating teacher registration and the accreditation of teacher education courses into a national system of teacher education.

Professional standards for teaching

The use of terms such as standards often arouses concern that there is an intention to standardise, in the sense of making everything the same. The committee wishes to make clear that in promoting standards it is not promoting a single model of teacher education or a national teacher education curriculum. On the contrary, standards, accompanied by well constructed means of assessing the degree to which they have been met (the outcomes), can provide for great flexibility, innovation and diversity.

In describing what teachers believe and know, what they understand, what they are able to do and what they value, professional standards for teaching articulate the complexity of teachers’ work and assure the community of their competence. Standards are of value to teachers, employing authorities, governments, students and parents. Standards guide all involved in educating teachers during their initial preparation and beyond; standards act as benchmarks against which the effectiveness of teacher education courses and the performance of teachers can be assessed; standards provide guidance for the allocation of resources; standards support induction and mentoring processes; standards help teachers shape their on-going professional learning and guide education systems in the provision of on-going learning opportunities and materials.

Many jurisdictions in Australia have, or are in the process of developing, professional standards for teaching. Professional associations in the fields of English, Maths and Science have also developed standards for their subject areas. Teaching Australia has also undertaken work towards the development of standards for advanced teaching and standards for school leadership.

At the national level, the value of standards has been recognised by the Ministerial Council on Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA), which, as part of its efforts towards the achievement of the National Goals for Schooling in the 21 st century, established a Teacher Quality and Educational Leadership Taskforce. The Taskforce proposed and developed a National Framework for Professional Standards for Teaching. State and Territory Federal Education Ministers endorsed the Framework in 2003.

MCEETYA’s National Framework for Professional Standards for Teaching identifies four stages or career dimensions of teachers as they undertake their teaching career: graduation, competence, accomplishment and leadership. The framework also identifies four professional elements of teachers’ work: professional knowledge, professional practice, professional values and professional relationships. ¹ The descriptions that are attached to both the dimensions and the elements are broad and generic, reinforcing the fact that the framework is not a set of standards but rather is designed to assist the development of standards.

Having endorsed the standards framework in 2003, MCEETYA agreed that the next step was to nationally align professional entry standards or graduate level standards.² In May 2006 MCEETYA’s Improving Teacher Quality and School Leadership Capacity Working Group, advised AESOC³ that “all State/Territory employers and registration/accreditation bodies have been asked for a report on progress in aligning their requirements for employment and or registration of graduate teachers with the National Framework for Professional Standards for Teaching”. An overview report was scheduled to be provided to AESOC at the end of 2006.⁴

Registration of teachers and accreditation of teacher education courses

While Queensland and South Australia have required teachers to be registered since the 1970s, it is only in recent years that other jurisdictions have established regulatory authorities and mandatory regulatory regimes.⁵ Most jurisdictions have two levels of registration—provisional registration for graduates and full registration for teachers who have demonstrated sufficient satisfactory teaching experience in schools.

With the development of professional standards for teaching, jurisdictions are increasingly moving towards tying the full registration of teachers to a requirement that they demonstrate that they have met the professional standards for teaching at competence level (the terminology may vary). Registration requirements for provisional registration typically require applicants to provide evidence of having successfully completed a teacher education course that has been approved or endorsed by the registration authority.

Accreditation is an endorsement that a teacher education program produces graduates who can meet provisional registration standards. “The primary function of accreditation is to assure the public that graduates from specific programs are professionally qualified and competent. By doing so, accreditation can help to raise professional status and drive quality improvements within the pre-service sector.”⁶ The Review outlines the degree to which processes for the implementation of accreditation of teacher education courses in Australia have been established as follows:

There are a variety of state-based processes in operation and /or under development or review and no nationally mandated requirement for accreditation of teacher education programs…

Since the mid 1960s, there have been calls at both the federal and state levels for the introduction of pre-service teacher education course accreditation. Today, nearly half a century later, just three states have legislation requiring formal approval or accreditation of teacher education programs and only two states Queensland and Victoria have implemented formal processes of course review and approval. New South Wales is in the process of fine-tuning entry standards for teaching and linked formal processes for approving teacher education programs. Legislation in South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory implies that teacher education course accreditation or approval is required, but does not specifically mandate formal accreditation of teacher education courses by the respective registration authorities. Rather, it requires teacher education authorities to ‘confer’, ‘cooperate’, ‘collaborate’ and/or ‘liaise’ in developing teacher education programs. In Tasmania, the legislation indicates that teachers must have completed an ‘approved course related to teacher training’. Essentially, most states require teacher education programs to be ‘endorsed’ or ‘approved’ rather than ‘accredited’. In South Australia for example the teacher registration authority confers with institutions about initial teacher education courses to confirm that certain criteria, such as core subjects and minimum days of professional experience, are met. Processes for course approval and endorsement are currently being developed in Western Australia and the Northern Territory. To date there is no teacher registration or teacher education course approval legislation in the ACT.⁷

The use of professional teaching standards in registration and accreditation processes

The committee strongly supports the use of professional standards for teaching in the processes for both the registration of teachers and the accreditation of teacher education courses.

Linking standards to registration

Linking professional teaching standards to the process of registering teachers provides clarity and direction to people becoming, preparing, supporting or assessing teachers.

Linking professional standards to the teacher registration process at different levels supports teacher education at each of its different stages:

• linking graduate or entry standards to the granting of provisional registration provides clear goals for the design of teacher education programs;
• linking standards of professional competence to full registration guides beginning teachers, their mentors, principals, and employing authorities on what must be achieved in order to gain full registration and therefore helps to identify the type of professional development that beginning teachers need to undertake; and
• linking standards of professional accomplishment and professional leadership to registration at higher levels provides encouragement and reward for teachers’ participation in on-going professional learning and engagement in roles that help prepare the next generation of teachers or that deepen the knowledge base of teaching and learning.

One review of teacher education accreditation, noted that “while there is a wide agreement that teacher education programs should be embraced within some sort of regulatory accreditation framework, the ways in which this should happen, and the links between registration and accreditation are less well defined”.⁸

There are significant differences in the extent to which states and territories have developed professional standards for teaching. Not only are there differences in both the amount of detail that is being incorporated into the standards and the number of levels of standards being developed, there are also significant differences in the degree to which they are being applied to registration processes.⁹

Linking standards to accreditation

Just as the linking of professional teaching standards to the registration process strengthens the registration process, so should the linking of standards to the accreditation of teacher education courses strengthen the accreditation process. Standards have value not only in informing the design of teacher education courses but also in acting as a benchmark for accreditation bodies to use in assessing how well teacher education courses are preparing their students.

DEST informed the committee that, “in terms of incorporating standards in the ‘accrediting’ of teacher education courses, most jurisdictions maintain a list of ‘approved courses’ in their state or territory. The approval criteria are not necessarily directly linked to graduate of entry level standards so much as to minimum hours and required subjects. The link between the accreditation of teacher training courses and the registration of teachers varies across jurisdictions. In most cases, the extent, if any, to which teacher professional standards informs the course accreditation process is not clear.”¹⁰ Only in Queensland and Victoria are the course accreditation processes clearly articulated with teacher registration and standards.¹¹

The committee notes that under the new policy and processes for approving the initial teacher education programs in New South Wales, courses will be approved on the basis that they meet the Graduate Teacher Standards of the NSW Institute of Teachers.¹²

Efforts to achieve national consistency

The committee recognises that efforts are being made, by both MCEETYA and the Australasian Forum of Teacher Registration and Accreditation Authorities (AFTRAA) to promote and achieve greater national consistency and collaboration. The terms of reference for MCEETYA’s Improving Teacher Quality and School Leadership Capacity Working Group provide for it to assure the quality of teachers and teaching by ensuring that nationally consistent standards for graduate teachers are developed and embedded in requirements for teaching in all Australian schools. Similarly, many of AFTRAA’s terms of reference endorsed by MCEETYYA in May 2005 concern standards, and registration and accreditation processes.

AFTRAA will consider areas of national importance and common responsibility to member organisations, in particular:

• Pre-service teacher education accreditation;
• Teacher registration and accreditation (including qualifications, criminal history records checking, etc.);
• Professional standards;
• Continuous professional development or learning;
• Professional disciplinary matters; and
• Matters concerning both the Commonwealth and Trans-Tasman Mutual Recognition legislation.

Within these areas of national responsibility, AFTRAA may:

• Facilitate collaboration and, where appropriate, coordination in the development and promotion of professional standards and professional learning for the teaching profession within the Commonwealth of Australia and its States and Territories;
• Provide a means whereby senior officers and chairs of teacher registration and accreditation authorities may:

  Counsel together on matters of concern;

  Formulate and forward to appropriate authorities advice on relevant matters including those of national concern;

  Collect and disseminate information on matters of collective interest;

  Effectively evaluate any activities undertaken;

• Identify common and agreed issues and planning priorities through consideration of the problems and needs of teacher registration and accreditation authorities, their relations with other educational institutions, with governments, and with the community;
• Be an advocate for and promote the teacher registration, accreditation and/or certification functions and collaborate on issues of national importance affecting those functions;
• Promote by study and discussion the effectiveness and efficiency of teacher registration and accreditation authorities;
• Consult and liaise with relevant educational bodies in Australia and overseas in the interest of promoting and further developing teacher quality though registration, accreditation and certification arrangements;
• Collect, compile, disseminate and distribute amongst members, information of common concern and information which will assist in the management and further development of teacher registration, accreditation and certification in particular and which affects or could affect teacher registration and accreditation;
• Facilitate improved national consistency, and where agreed, collaboration in the regulation and promotion of the teaching profession;
• Advise MCEETYA through AESOC or other relevant MCEETYA groups on the above matters or on any other matters referred by AESOC or MCEETYA; and
• Undertake any specific tasks requested by MCEETYA or AESOC.¹³

A national standards-based system of teacher education

It is of some concern to the committee that despite the level of activity, there is a considerable gap between those jurisdictions which have made significant advances in developing processes of registration and accreditation, particularly in terms of embedding standards into these processes, and those that are at a very early stage in the process of developing standards. The committee is concerned by the lack of consistency and also by the duplication of effort and resources. From a national perspective, we are still a long way from where parents, students, schools and systems in any jurisdiction can be assured that the pre-service preparation of a teacher, wherever it has occurred, will have met certain agreed standards. We are even further from the situation where a teacher can be confident that his or her efforts in one jurisdiction to upgrade qualifications, undertake professional development or participate in preparing the next generation of teachers will be recognised in another.

In the committee’s view, it is in the national interest that the resources applied to developing and implementing professional standards for teaching, processes for the registration of teachers and processes for the accreditation of teacher education courses are used efficiently and effectively.

As stated, schooling in Australia would be better served by a more nationally integrated system. Registration as a teacher or accreditation of a teacher education course should ensure certain identifiable outcomes irrespective of the route taken to achieve those outcomes or the location. In the committee’s view, much would be gained by integrating teacher registration and the accreditation of teacher education courses into a national system of teacher education.

The committee’s proposal

In the national system of teacher education proposed by the committee, the state registration authorities would retain responsibility for registering teachers at the various levels of registration. The proposed national system would enable the individual jurisdictions to devote their resources to fully developing and implementing processes for assessing and registering teachers at different levels of registration and for rewarding and recognising teachers’ efforts in on-going professional learning as well as in taking on supervisory and mentoring roles. The accreditation of teacher education courses would be the responsibility of a national accreditation body. Both the processes for registering teachers and accrediting courses would use the national professional standards for teaching at graduate level. The state and territory registration bodies (and AFTRAA) and the national accreditation body would need to work in cooperation and, in particular, collaborate on the development of these standards. Developing the national professional standards for teaching at graduate level should be one of the initial steps towards developing a national system of teacher education. The accreditation of teacher education courses would be the responsibility of a national teacher education accreditation body. The proposal is represented diagrammatically in Figure 1.

The remainder of this chapter will focus on the development and implementation of a system of national accreditation of teacher education courses.

Figure 1 Standards-based Registration of Teachers and Accreditation of Courses

National accreditation of teacher education courses

Why national accreditation?

As discussed earlier in this chapter, course accreditation is a key quality assurance mechanism. The committee therefore considers that it is in the public interest for all teacher education courses to undergo an accreditation process of consistent rigour. While some jurisdictions have well-developed accreditation processes, others have not yet started or are only in the very early stages. The varying rate at which accreditation is being implemented around the nation is not the committee’s only concern. The models of accreditation that are being adopted are not of equal rigour. National accreditation which builds on the best model that is currently available will ensure that all jurisdictions have access to the benefits of sound accreditation processes.

The operational aspects of accreditation are often delegated to a panel comprising members drawn from the profession. With national accreditation, the panels would be comprised of representatives from a number of jurisdictions. There is an opportunity for shared learning across jurisdictions in national accreditation that should not be missed.

Far from promoting a single model of teacher education, national accreditation, in providing a robust mechanism for ensuring quality, allows for and can even encourage greater diversity and innovation.

National accreditation could dovetail neatly with the work undertaken by the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA)¹⁴, the agency established by MCEETYA in 2000 to promote, audit and report on quality assurance in Australian higher education. AUQA investigates the extent to which institutions are achieving their missions and objectives, and assesses each institution’s quality assurance arrangements in the key areas of teaching and learning, research and management as well as its success in maintaining standards consistent with quality frameworks for university education in Australia. In reporting on the degree to which universities meet their own internally defined mission and objectives, AUQA’s role is quite distinct from the accreditation role of agencies which hold “courses to account against external standards for graduate knowledge and program quality”.¹⁵

National accreditation would facilitate alignment with international developments such as the Bologna Process, a process whereby 45 countries across Europe are working to harmonise their higher education systems and structures. Alignment with some of the Bologna actions may well benefit the profession through improving the portability of qualifications and facilitating students’ access to opportunities to undertake part of their study overseas. National accreditation will facilitate generally the establishment of international mutual recognition arrangements.

Views of stakeholders on national accreditation

The committee heard a range views on the value of the national accreditation of teacher education programs. Some jurisdictions were against the notion, unconvinced of its value, while others preferred a federation model.

In its submission to the inquiry, the Board of Teacher Registration, Queensland (now called the Queensland College of Teachers) stated, “We firmly believe that accreditation of teacher education programs is a matter for individual states and territories and can see little if any value in additional layers of regulation”.¹⁶

In giving evidence to the committee, the Victorian Institute of Teaching referred to its own capacity to influence teacher education programs because “of the fact that , ultimately, if the courses are not approved by us, the graduates for those courses cannot enter the profession”. It queried the capacity that a national body may have in this respect. It suggested that “if we can construct a national framework, it is possible for the jurisdictions to work within a national framework to achieve some higher degree of national consistency and alignment without necessarily having to place all that work in a national entity”.¹⁷

The Teachers Registration Board of South Australia indicated a preference for a federation model, where jurisdictions worked together to achieve a consistency and uniformity but retained their ‘state originality’, rather than a national model.¹⁸

Some stakeholders were more supportive of a national approach. The NSW Institute of Teachers supported “a national vehicle or set of processes for the accreditation of teacher education courses provided that it took into account the requirements and interests of states, schools and mechanisms.”¹⁹

Significantly, the Australian Council of Deans of Education gave strong support for the notion of national accreditation, pointing out many of its advantages.

ACDE have been very supportive from the beginning of the notion of national accreditation. We believe that the time has come to break down any old state and territory boundaries around accreditation, given the movement of population and the statistics as to the much more mobile profession that we have. Indeed… I believe that it actually needs to be even bigger than that and that we need national accreditation that is in tune with those of major provinces overseas, like the United States, with the NCATE and TEAC processes there, and the UK—the places where our teachers in fact do move to regularly and indeed where teacher training has the potential to become an international part of an enterprise in the future.

My own view—and I have had this conversation with the MCEETYA groups responsible for the intersections of the state, territory and federal areas—is that the various institutes that are being set up at the moment around the states and territories do very well the job of individual teacher registration. They are employing body kinds of overseeing groups. Some of that obviously touches on the business of accreditation. Indeed, if we do not separate the business of genuine higher education quality assurance from the business of individual teacher registration and all the very real concerns there—child protection acts and those sorts of things—the business of teacher education, the accreditation issue, tends to end up serving the registration issue. So it is a way in which I think we can use the federal system quite well to say that states and territories do the employment and that they need to look to the registration issue but that we need a national accreditation process that takes that—the needs of employers—into account but has a bigger vision about higher education quality assurance, making sure that we have the best internationalised programs in any place.²⁰

While noting the reservations of the registration bodies in some of the jurisdictions, the committee does not consider that they outweigh the value of having national accreditation.

The challenge of introducing national accreditation for teacher education courses is to ensure that all stakeholders have input into the development of the model and representation on the national accreditation body.

A national system of accreditation should be at least as rigorous as the best State or Territory accreditation process currently in operation. Although there would be nothing to prevent individual jurisdictions from maintaining their own processes as an additional layer of regulation should they consider it necessary. Consideration could also be given to the national accreditation body being able to delegate its role to a State or Territory accreditation body provided that it used the national standards and assessment procedures as the basis of its accreditation of courses.

A national teacher accreditation body

A key component of the national system of teacher education proposed by the committee should be the accreditation of teacher education courses by a national agency.

The Hobart Forum on Teacher Education submitted that members of professions such as engineering, law and medicine, accountancy and others “have a major role in determining entry standards, performance expectation, accountability requirements and continuing registration to practice”. “The teaching profession,” it stated “requires no less”. It suggested that an appropriate national authority, equivalent in standing to the Australian Medical Council, is needed to bring together the varied interests and to ensure a strong voice for the profession, teacher educators included.²¹

In giving evidence to the committee, Dr Ingvarson also noted the effectiveness of the Australian Medical Council’s model of national accreditation.

It increases the cross-fertilisation of ideas across the states when you have assessors and accrediting panels coming from interstate to look at teacher education programs. You get much more cross-fertilisation of ideas. The model there that would be very effective is the Australian Medical Council. That was set up in 1985. The state ministers of health got together and the state medical practitioners boards got together and agreed to set up that body nationally to carry out the accreditation function. That took it outside the state. It was a much more independent body and, as I say, there were many more opportunities for comparisons across the country and cross-fertilisation of ideas.²²

Teaching Australia has a strong interest in national accreditation and has started developing a national system for the accreditation of teacher preparation programs. As part of its work in this area, Teaching Australia commissioned ACER to undertake a review of national and international trends and practices in teacher education accreditation. On the basis of this review, it developed a consultation paper outlining its propositions for the establishment of an Australia-wide accreditation system. ²³ The paper has been distributed and consultations with key stakeholders are underway.

The system that Teaching Australia is proposing would be voluntary and take into account and complement existing state-based course approval arrangements.²⁴ The committee is aware that there are some excellent national accreditation systems in other professions and in other countries where accreditation by the national body is voluntary. The highly regarded course accreditation system run by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) in the United States is one such example.

Teaching Australia is well placed to host a national accreditation system. However, while there are examples of successful voluntary accreditation arrangements, the committee considers that a mandatory approach would be more effective in delivering the benefits of a national accreditation system. Ultimately, teacher education courses in receipt of Commonwealth funding should be required to be accredited by the national teacher education accreditation body.

It is critical that the processes involved in consulting with stakeholders, establishing and implementing national accreditation build on the culture of collaboration that is already evident in individual jurisdictions and in organisations such as AFTRAA and the ACDE. It is also critical that these and other significant stakeholders have the opportunity to be represented on the national accreditation body.

A key task in establishing national accreditation will be the development of national professional standards for teaching at graduate or entry level and also standards for teacher education programs. The latter may specify aspects of program provision including the qualifications of staff, the nature and extent of professional experience, and methods of selecting students. Another key task will be the establishment of rigorous accreditation processes that effectively assess how well courses are preparing students to meet the national professional teaching standards at graduate level.

There is much to be gained from the national accreditation of teacher education courses provided it is based on well developed standards and rigorous processes of assessment and that it involves the profession in advisory and consultation roles. Achieving this will require the allocation of a level of resources that is commensurate with the importance of the task and a long term commitment.

Australian Education Systems Officials Committee, MCEETYA. Back

Department of Education, Science and Training, Supplementary Submission No. 59.2, p. 2. Back

Department of Education, Science and Training, Submission No. 59.2, pp. 1-2. Back

Australian Council of Deans of Education, Transcript of Evidence, 13 October 2005, p. 4. Back

Australian Council of Deans of Education, Transcript of Evidence, 13 October 2006, p. 4. Back

Hobart Forum on Teacher Education, Submission No. 171, p. 4. Back

Dr Lawrence Ingvarson, Transcript of Evidence, 7 June 2005, p. 19. Back

Teaching Australia, Submission No. 168, p. 4. Back