Improving teacher effectiveness: a reform imperative

Originally appeared in 'The Australian' on Saturday, 21 July 2012

Improving teacher effectiveness: a reform imperative

Over the last decade, Australia’s performance in education has slipped and a number of school systems (particularly in Asia) have overtaken us, despite education spending over the same period increasing in real terms by 44 per cent.

We’re paying more and achieving less.

For the last five years we have heard a constant stream of rhetoric from the current Federal Government about an ‘education revolution’.  Instead of a ‘revolution’, what has been delivered is a masterclass in wasteful spending and appalling mismanagement, without any tangible impact on the ultimate goal: improved student outcomes.

There have been many theories advanced and supported over the years about how best to improve outcomes, with one of the most persistent being to hire more teachers to reduce class sizes. Extensive research into this policy reveals that it was both incredibly expensive, and entirely ineffective. A recent review of international and domestic studies by the Grattan Institute provides direction as to where we should be focusing our efforts and resources:

“the evidence overwhelmingly shows that investing in improved teacher effectiveness rather than the number of teachers is the most successful method of improving student learning and creating top performing education systems”.

 To deliver meaningful advances in teacher effectiveness, there are three actions that we need to pursue. First, we need to change the attitudes that high performing school leavers have towards a career education, second, we must improve the quality of teacher training courses ('pre-service education'), and third, we must change the way we manage and develop the teachers who are already working in schools.

To ensure that Australia has a world leading education system, we need to make sure we have world class minds teaching the next generation. A 2009 survey of school leavers clearly revealed the problem we face, with only 1% of school leavers with a TER over 90 listing a teaching degree as their first preference for university. Changing attitudes to teaching amongst high achievers is no easy task, but independent programs like Teach for Australia have shown great promise.

Teach for Australia is based on Teach for America, an US program that has expanded to more than 20 other countries over the last two decades. These programs work by recruiting high performing University graduates to complete an intensive teacher training course before being placed as a teacher in a disadvantaged school.

Internationally, they have built an impressive track record of increasing the prestige and appeal of a career in education, with one in five graduates from Harvard University applying to Teach for America in 2011, and in the UK, nearly one in ten of all final year Oxford undergraduates applying to their ‘Teach Next’ program (which itself only began in 2002).

In addition to changing attitudes about education, we need to improve the quality of pre-service education, as it currently is not preparing new teachers adequately for life in the classroom.

Teachers and principals are critical of current pre-service education offerings for failing to adequately focus on practical skills that teachers need to succeed in the classroom.

A Coalition Government would redraft pre-service education course requirements so that they are appropriately focussed on these skills. Additionally, by re-writing the University compacts, the Federal Government could ensure that Universities provide the mentoring and support their teaching graduates need to successfully transition to life in the classroom.

Finally, those teachers who are already in the workforce need support to become more effective. While mentoring and professional development systems do formally exist in Australia schools, they are deeply ineffective, widely viewed as check-the-box, administrative burdens completed only to satisfy the demands of central office.

Unsurprisingly, these systems fail to recognise and encourage high quality teaching or address poor performance, with nine in ten teachers saying that they would not receive any recognition if they improved the quality of their teaching, and seven in ten observing that teachers who display sustained poor performance will not be dismissed.

We can, and must do better than this.

Central to recent Productivity Commission recommendations about effective professional development systems for schools was that idea that principals and staff must take the lead role in determining how their school should monitor and improve teacher effectiveness, and that central agencies must be limited to supporting and enabling these efforts, not directing them.

Ultimately, the Coalition is committed, in conjunction with State Governments, to introducing genuine principal and school autonomy into the Government school system. This will create the foundation necessary for principals to hire the right staff for the right positions, develop them, and effectively manage those who continually underperform.

Christopher Pyne is the Federal Member for Sturt, the Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training and the Manager of Opposition Business in the House.