Autumn 2006

The big picture - in education

Preserving the profession

Teacher education is always under scrutiny—and often under fire.Terence Lovat examines why other university training courses enjoy greater status than teaching and presents the case for strengthening the existing university-based teacher training system rather than abandoning it.

In the face of teacher shortage and the many alleged ways in which the teaching profession fails to meet community expectations, or at least the expectations of a vocal minority, teacher education inevitably comes under fire for failing to produce the kinds of teachers, in sufficient numbers, that society (or this vocal minority) says it wants. When Ministers for Education, Directors-General, principals and teachers tire of the criticism levelled at their schools’ literacy policy, homework practice, test results or their lack of readiness to deal with terrorism and its threats to our society, even they are inclined to turn on teacher education to avoid taking all the blame.

The university connection

Teacher education often finds itself friendless. Purportedly lacking the status of some of its university peers—especially medicine, law and engineering—it is said to be failing in its fundamental task of preparing the kind of professional that its own profession seeks. In this climate, it is inevitable that there will be calls for radical change in teacher education, changes that are widely predicted to occur as a result of the House of Representatives Inquiry into Teacher Education due to report by late 2006.

Part of the alleged problem that the Inquiry might fix revolves around the university connection with teacher education. The fact that teacher education now comes as a highly competitive, fully-fledged university degree, just as 25 years of reports and inquiries have urged, seems now to be presenting a problem. It is claimed that teacher education has become too theoretical, too remote from classroom realities, too over-stocked with people who are more concerned with research than inducting their students into a profession. Such claims are asserted with force and appear to have the backing of a political culture found across both the major and minor parties. This culture is more concerned with being seen to be solving today’s alleged problems than with engaging with the long-standing issues of teacher professionalism and teacher education’s role in this.

The numbers game

The main challenge for teacher education is that it must deal in one year with the numbers that some of its peer professions deal with in ten years. For example, in 2006, the University of Newcastle entered approximately 80 medical education students and 250 engineering students. At the same time, it entered close to 1,300 teacher education students. While it is easy enough to compare teacher education’s status and productivity odiously with those of other professions, it is not so easy to address the differences in any effective way, especially given these vastly different numbers and the fact that teacher education is resourced so much more poorly than any of the other professional training regimes.

The funding formula of the past 15 years seems to suggest that Australian society believes teacher education can be done on the cheap. Medicine and engineering are generously funded, as is nursing in comparative terms, yet the formula suggests that it costs no more to train a teacher than a sociologist, and training someone in drama requires more resources.

Increasingly, teacher education has been asked to do the biggest single job in the higher education sector. It has public accountabilities that match, even surpass, those of other professions and yet endures resource levels suggestive of nonprofessional, liberal studies with no public accountabilities. How far have we fallen since the Martin Report (1965) declared that effective teacher education is such an important means of building a functional and highly competitive Australia that it should have at its disposal the best resources higher education can provide?

Martin called for teacher education to sit beside professional training in medicine, law and engineering as a higher education program with equivalent status and rigour. Martin’s even more explicit challenge was to ensure equivalent resources for all training regimes. What followed was tangibly different. Instead of the comprehensive and seamless higher education system Martin envisaged, Australia moved to a binary divide, one which saw medicine, law and engineering sitting on the better resourced and research-based side, while most of teacher education fell on the other side. In many ways, the need for 25 years of almost annual reports and inquiries into teacher education, beginning with Auchmuty (1980) and culminating with the current House of Representatives Inquiry, can be explained by the fact that teacher education has been treated shabbily by public funding policy during that time, rather than in the privileged way envisioned by Martin.

The quick-fix mentality

The many facile attacks on teacher education, and the even more facile solutions that are put forward, must be tempered with some of these historical realities. Of all the facile solutions, the most non-historical and potentially damaging is the one increasingly referred to as ‘school-based teacher education’. If it is agreed that university-based teacher education is out of touch, then the obvious solution, it is said, is to remove it from the university and place it in the school. The fact that the proponents of school-based teacher education rarely even allude to the many monumental issues involved with teacher disposition, school readiness, industrial relations, physical resources and human infrastructure illustrates just how facile the notion remains.

School-based teacher education has the potential to undo everything that has been achieved against all the odds of inadequate resources. The government of the day failed dismally to enact the Martin vision for higher education and, in so doing, placed teacher education in a less than optimal context for its proper growth and development. In spite of this, the resounding message from the many reports and inquiries is that teacher education warrants the destiny proposed by Martin. The Federal Senate report on the status of teaching (Senate, 1998) perhaps most explicitly stated that public recognition of teaching as a profession relies, in large part, on the status of its training arm.

The fact that medicine, law and engineering are perceived to require full university training, to be hard to get into and to have high academic standards helps sustain the status of these professions in the public eye. Any suggestion that the knowledge and skills required by these professions could be learnt ‘on the job’ would damage their standing. The same is true of teaching. School-based teacher education would deny the direction set by Martin and most of the reports and inquiries since. Moreover, tragically, it would fail to acknowledge that, against all the odds, the vision of Martin has already been fulfilled in some important ways.

Celebrate successes

In 2006, when numbers and university entry scores are put together, teacher education is the most competitive award on offer. On scores alone, virtually any teacher education student could have entered arts, science or accountancy with many points to spare. Moreover, in spite of there being four to five times the number of places to fill, the vast majority of teacher education entrants could have entered engineering. The traditional model of teacher education is doing its job for the teaching profession and the nation’s good. It would be a travesty to undo all this for little more than a set of vacuous promises.

Australian teacher graduates enjoy almost celebrity status in places like the United Kingdom. It should be remembered that the UK moved substantially to school-based teacher education a generation ago and for the past few years, has been working very hard to undo the damage this has caused. Moving many thousands of well-trained Australian teachers into its schools is a huge plank in the campaign to promote teaching as an attractive career, including for the more academically capable.

School-based teacher education, it is argued, could strengthen practical skills by providing exposure to classroom realities. But while teacher educators in Australia agree that greater school access would enhance their programs, they understand that the practical experience component is expensive. Achieving enhanced school access for teacher training cannot come without the greater level of resources denied it for the past 40 years.

The current House of Representatives Inquiry should be wary of engaging unwittingly in the action of wrecking. Instead, it needs to build on the very formidable foundations that have been established in Australian teacher education—celebrate its successes against the odds, enhance further its already formidable international status, and above all ensure that it is resourced sufficiently to continue playing its positive role in the development of teacher professionalism. Allow university-based teacher training to continue to contribute to the nation its teachers serve.

References

Auchmuty, J [Chair] (1980). Report of the National Inquiry into Teacher Education (Australia), Canberra, AGPS.

Martin, L [Chair] (1965). Tertiary Education in Australia: Report of the committee on the future of tertiary education in Australia to the Australian Universities Commission, Vols. 1–3, Government Printer, Melbourne.

Inquiry into Teacher Education (2005–2006), House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and vocational training, available at www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/evt/teachereduc/index.htm

Senate (1998). A Class Act: Inquiry into the status of the teaching profession available at www.aph.gov.au/senate/Committee/eet_ctte/completed_inquiries/1996-99/teachers/report/

Professor Terence Lovat is Pro Vice-Chancellor (Education and Arts) at the University of Newcastle.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au