Hey politicians, leave those teachers alone
Making it harder to enter teaching while continuing to throw graduates to the lions won't solve anything. The only way to attract the best and brightest is by making teaching desirable again, writes Jane Caro.
A young woman I know who scored over 98 in the HSC and graduated with first-class Honours from a top university is in her first year as a teacher at one of the most disadvantaged schools in New South Wales.
She arrived full of zeal, enthusiasm and commitment, and is being well-supported by her faculty. But, according to her worried mother, she is spending three nights a week curled up in the fetal position sobbing inconsolably.
Her despair is a result of the psychological and emotional warfare being waged by some of her students, who are themselves battling such levels of disadvantage and neglect that society as a whole has washed its hands of them. Somehow she is expected to succeed where everyone else has failed. Her high ATAR and impressive academic record are of little help to her right now.
No wonder one third of new teachers leave the profession within five years. Highly sought after by other employers for their training, people skills and for withstanding a baptism of fire like the one described above, they take jobs with higher pay, much better conditions, lower stress and higher status. And because people attracted to teaching are often serious-minded and committed, they do very well. This is of great benefit to their new employers, but a big loss to Australia as a whole.
Legislators are nervously aware of the major difficulties we are struggling with in our education system. Our international ranking is slipping and the troublesome "long tail" of underachievers is growing. Our bottom 10 per cent of students can be as many as six years behind our top 10 per cent by the time they finish school, which is a disaster for them, and a disaster for all of us in the long run.
We know the causes of this: an increasingly segregated education system where we not only concentrate all of our most disadvantaged kids in the same schools, thereby compounding their disadvantage, but also chronically underfund the schools they attend. Australia is the third lowest investor in public education in the OECD, and public schools enrol the vast majority of the disadvantaged.
To really starting turning our education system around we need to either change our current highly segregated system (unlikely) or fund schools properly according to need, something that the Gonski reforms are at least attempting to do. Neither solution is particularly attractive to politicians, often because of the lobbying of vested interests.
The NSW Government has decided to try to tackle what they call "teacher quality", implying, of course, that the teachers we have now are somehow not up to the mark. They want to do this by changing the ATAR required to study teaching at university. Applicants would have to have at least three subjects with ATARs over 80, of which one must be English. My young friend in the fetal position would sail through such requirements, of course.
Not to be outdone, the Federal Government have jumped on board with Minister Peter Garrett suggesting literacy and numeracy tests for teachers (great, more tests, just the joyous incentive potential educators need), pre-enrolment interviews, and nationwide practicum guidelines (it is already extremely difficult to get already overburdened teachers to take on a prac student, so more onerous guidelines, admin and forms don't fill me with confidence as a solution), among other "improvements". All of them come with more than a whiff of the purse-lipped finger-wag about them. Ironic when you consider that one of the suggestions is some sort of emotional intelligence measure. A case of physician heal thyself, perhaps?
Worse, these solutions won't really change anything and are only necessary because of a problem politicians themselves have created. By turning universities into a competitive market and allowing all sorts of educational institutions to call themselves one, they have inevitably created intense competition for students.
As with all competitions, this has worked well for the market winners - faculties like law, medicine, engineering and even communications in the prestigious universities. They have been able to raise and raise their ATARs due to an increasing demand for their courses. Bright students are - by definition - not stupid; they go for the courses that will qualify them for the best paying, highest status professions.
For the market losers, however, like the teaching, arts and humanities faculties in the less well-regarded universities, the ATARs have fallen as demand for their courses has fallen. To keep their funding, those institutions have had to find students wherever they can. Arts and humanities are no longer seen as degrees that will help you get any kind of reasonably well paid job, and the real pay, status and respect we give teachers as a profession has been falling for decades. It is hardly surprising, then, that in the competition for students, some teaching degrees are struggling.
We have also been relying on the fact that until a few decades ago, academically gifted women had few employment options other than teaching. The last of those bright women will be reaching retirement age in the next five years, so the problem is likely to get even worse.
Currently, we have both a shortage and an oversupply of teachers. This is partly about the type of school and subject, and also about location and what are called "hard to staff" schools. If you graduate as a primary, PE or art teacher in a big city, you may find it tough to find a permanent position whatever your ATAR or final mark.
If you graduate as a maths, science or technical studies teacher, you will be snapped up. If you are prepared to travel to a rural or remote area, you are also more likely to find a permanent position. And, contrary to popular belief, it is much harder to get a permanent job as a beginning teacher in a public school than a private one. The Department of Education targets the top graduates and generally employs them first.
If we really want to help our teachers, both new and experienced, to do their jobs to the best of their ability, we need to do some fairly obvious things. First, give the teachers in the toughest schools the support they need. Larger class sizes may be fine in nice middle-class schools, but in schools dealing with the really tough social and behavioural problems that generational poverty and marginalisation can cause, they will make everything worse. The really tough schools may need teachers aides, social workers and behavioural psychologists on staff to free teachers up to do their job.
We need to lower the workload on teachers, particularly for young teachers and those in tough schools, so that they can de-stress and get the support they need to survive. We certainly don't need to add to their stress with more testing or hoops to jump through.
We need to give them time to do specialist professional development and experienced mentors to coax them out of the fetal position and give them strategies to cope. (By the way, the current mentoring program is being scaled back.) Just as you can only help children develop effectively by supporting their mothers, so you only help children learn effectively by supporting their teachers.
If we simply raise the ATAR and the hurdles that must be jumped over before you can do a teaching degree, but continue to throw young teachers to the lions unsupported, all we will do is have an even higher churn. The brighter the teacher, the more choices they have, so if this is all we do, expect teacher retention problems to get even greater.
But if we support, nurture and respect our teachers, and acknowledge and reward the degree of difficulty they face in their extremely demanding jobs, we won't have to artificially fiddle about with ATARs and interviews. If we make teaching a desirable job again, the ATARs will rise all on their own.
Jane Caro is a writer, commentator, lecturer and co-author (with Chris Bonnor) of The Stupid Country; How Australia is dismantling public education (2007).
View her full profile here.
