The 3Rs for teachers:

When you’ve been a teacher for as long I have, you’ve just about seen it all in terms of teacher education.

I finished school in 1972. In those days, it was a fantastic achievement for young women to complete school and go on to further education. The qualification we received was a Teaching Certificate at a teacher’s college. Later in the 1970s, after the ‘Whitlam Revolution’ had taken hold, the teaching colleges became colleges of advanced education and they, in turn, transformed into universities with the ‘Dawkins Reforms’ of the mid 1980s. Between getting my Teaching Certificate, working, four children and today, I obtained two degree qualifications.

Today, you can’t set foot in a classroom as a teacher unless you’ve got a four-year undergraduate degree.

But over the course of those 40 years, it’s absolutely true to say that the quality of teachers coming into the classroom has varied greatly.

I have had young teachers under my wing who could barely read or write – yet they were teaching others to do so. They had not read some of the classic books, they didn’t know the basics of mathematics, their understanding of how our basic political structure worked was non-existent and they couldn’t spell to save themselves. (I must also point out that there are many more wonderful teachers also).

How did this happen? Simply because, for a period, becoming a teacher was relatively easy.

I have a friend (who is not a teacher) who tells the story that, in her class of 28 students all of whom passed their Year 12, half of them went on to be teachers – the bottom-half of the class. In more recent times, many people have come into teaching through a different pathway. Only 27% have come into teacher education on the basis of their Year 12 results, and some have entered the profession after being in another occupation. This is very welcome but the combination of these evolving forces has meant that not all teachers have had the level of literacy and numeracy we expect.

I am well aware that this has been a frustration and a complaint of many parents over the years, so it was good to learn that Education Ministers agreed this week to publish Year 12 study scores of students entering initial teacher education. My understanding is that this is not to keep people out of teacher education, but to ensure that the necessary support is given to them during their education so they obtain it through their studies. Their literacy and numeracy levels will be assessed at the end of the degree course also.

Any measure is worth trying and let’s hope this one results in improvements all-round. It’s good and important to give parents and the community a level of satisfaction that the women (and we are mostly women) and men who have responsibility for guiding their kids through 12 foundation years of their lives have reached a standard in the ‘3 Rs’ that is worthy of being a ‘teacher’.