In early July 2023, the Australian government published the report of its Teacher Education Expert Panel (TEEP) – the latest review of initial teacher education (ITE) in Australia’s long history of such reviews. To read the report, you could think that Australian universities’ ITE programs were entirely unregulated free-for-alls and that lecturers had deliberately avoided teaching anything practical for decades. If you looked at the media coverage – and listened to some of the Education Minister’s comments – you would think that Australia’s teachers were up-in-arms about the poor quality of their teaching degrees that are run by cultural Marxists gone feral.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Rigorous state and territory-level regulation occurs on regular cycles within national frameworks, with accreditation requirements frequently updated within those cycles. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of Australian teachers think that their teaching degrees were good or very good with just 5% thinking they were poor, as forthcoming research (based on a representative sample) shows (Ellis, Cooper & Blannin, in press).
The report and the response to it reflects familiar discourses internationally, usually under right-wing governments flexing their ‘strong state’ muscles. Already suspicious of universities for being relatively autonomous (a really bad quality for institutions in the strong state lexicon), for disseminating challenging ideas and encouraging debate, universities become the convenient scapegoat for the problems of under-developed, under-funded school systems, especially when a country’s economy is in trouble and especially when school reform policies and poor pay and conditions lead to shortages of teachers (see Ellis, Gatti & Mansell, forthcoming). To my surprise, listening to Australian federal ministers talk about teacher education reminds me of listening to ministers in Boris Johnson’s Conservative government in England.
Of course, the TEEP report was not entirely misguided. Beyond the very occasional acknowledgement that Australia does indeed have some excellent ITE programs, the renewed attention to school-based mentoring was welcome. Work-based learning for teachers (for that is what already takes up a considerable proportion of most good teaching degrees) does indeed need greater support and development, not only in Australia but in most parts of the world. Given the forthcoming referendum on constitutional changes to incorporate an Indigenous Voice in parliament, there were some important calls to diversify the teaching workforce. These calls were weaker than in the panel’s previous discussion paper, though. Funding for innovation in ITE was something that many of us called for in our responses to that paper but the details were sketchy in the report.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many in Australian university Education Schools have been highly critical of TEEP (see Debra Hayes’ Op-Ed for a particularly good example of such criticism). So, what was the problem? At one level, it was some of the report’s recommendations. Picking up on another Boris Johnson government idea, the notion of mandatory ‘core content’ for teaching degrees is appealing to the authoritarian instincts of a certain kind of reformer. One of the risks with this approach is that, over time, ITE programs get designed to the bare ‘mandatory’ minimum – whatever Boris or whoever is in government at the time thinks is a good idea. (The key factor here is degree of surveillance). The core determines/becomes the whole, so the result is dumbed-down teaching degrees that don’t prepare anyone to do the job of teaching in an actual classroom; they just ‘meet’ the mandate.
Another risk is that the core is, well, a bit weird, built around the kind of content that emerges from discussions between people politicians dub ‘experts’ but many of whom either simply defer to their personal prejudices and/or settle scores, seek advancement, or simply provide advice they know will be politically acceptable. That’s not a criticism of any individuals – nor of the TEEP report in general – but it is a characteristic of such processes in more conservative political environments, in my personal experience. In the TEEP report, the brain fetish apparent in its specification of core content is contentious, to say the very least. This section is also where the influence of English ‘experts’ generously providing their advice is most apparent.
TEEP’s recommendation to create a new national body to quality assure the universities’ provision risks creating further bureaucracy in an already over-bureaucratised system. A new national body would replicate what is already occurring in greater detail at the state and territory level, and potentially create more ‘jobs for the boys’ in Canberra, further bloating the staffing costs of the government service rather than investing in government schools, where it is needed the most. This proposal to create a new bureaucracy is perhaps the give-away that the report was produced for a Labor government.
But perhaps the report’s most cynical recommendation is to use new teachers’ survival in the school systems that employ them as a performance measure for the universities that prepared them. In our response to the panel’s consultation paper, my colleagues and I urged them to take the long view and a system-wide perspective, and to extend their gaze into the schools and not only the universities. If teaching is an unattractive career because teachers in general are made responsible for Australia’s productivity and GDP growth; if some teachers are over-worked and micro-managed but given little support with students’ behavior; if teachers are under-paid relative to their years of experience and responsibilities, with few opportunities to engage in further professional development (something our research also shows), the problem is with the governance and funding of the school systems and not the universities. Universities will never be able to produce enough teachers if under-funded school systems continue to burn them out.
But it is not at that level – of TEEP’s specific recommendations – where the most significant issue lay for me. The critical issue was where this report came from in terms of its politics; the issue was the way that the ‘problem’ of teacher education was constructed. The problem was presented as Australian universities’ intentional negligence; of their laissez faire attitude to the serious job of preparing teachers; of the fiction that universities do as they please and reject evidence-based practices (the clue there is that the majority of Australian universities already teach what the report specifies as core – and the panel knew that); and the populist gestures to Australian teachers that they are being serially let down by the universities. That’s the now familiar Trumpian trope of the masses being let down by an elite who just don’t care.
Was it offence that made me respond to the TEEP report in this way? Did I take it as a personal slight?
No, it was pure disappointment. For a government that promised a fresh start and a new way of doing things on their election, this is an unwelcome reminder of the past; an unwelcome reminder of some of the old Empire’s education policies that have actually exacerbated teacher shortages in England; an unwelcome reminder of how politicians around the world have come to use populist gestures – whether to look ‘strong’ at the mid-point in an election cycle or to sow division and undermine public institutions that can be positioned as ‘the enemies of promise’.
Australia has a long tradition of reviewing its ITE programs. But now more than ever it is important to have a serious conversation both about how to improve the way we prepare teachers and rebuild school systems and career structures so that teachers actually stay.
References
Ellis, V., Cooper, R. & Blannin, J. (forthcoming, 2023). The Australian Teacher Survey 2023: Initial Teacher Education and Continuing Professional Development. Melbourne: Monash Education.
Ellis, V., Gatti, L. & Mansell, W. (forthcoming, 2024). The New Political Economy of Teacher Education: The Enterprise Narrative and the Shadow State. Bristol: Policy Press.
Viv Ellis 