EXCLUSIVE

Lifting the grade: tough new standards for Victorian teachers

Henrietta Cook

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Only the top 30 per cent of year 12 students will be able to study teaching in Victoria following a dramatic shake-up of the profession.

Under tough new entry standards, students wishing to enrol in an undergraduate teaching course will have to achieve a minimum ATAR of 65 in 2018. This will be hiked up to 70 the following year.

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Teachers to face tougher tests

It's about to get a lot tougher to get into a teaching course, with ATARs set to rise to 65 in 2018 and 70 in 2019.

It coincides with growing concerns about slipping standards – the average ATAR of students starting teaching courses in Victoria was 57.35 this year, down from 63.4 in 2013. Some courses only required an ATAR of 30.

A dramatic shake-up will set a new minimum ATAR for Victorian teaching students. Photo: Jamieson Murphy

Aspiring teachers will also have to sit a new compulsory test before being accepted into university courses, which will measure non-academic skills like problem solving, leadership, empathy, resilience.

Education Minister James Merlino will launch the suite of reforms on Wednesday in a bid to attract "the best and brightest" teachers to Victorian schools to boost student grades.

"Teaching is a noble and vitally important profession and we wanted to set an excellence bar," Mr Merlino said.

"We want the best and brightest young people to dream of becoming a teacher, and to know that being a teacher requires academic excellence."

The Education Department will develop a new Vocational Education Training course by 2018 that will create a "stepping stone" into an undergraduate teaching course for people changing careers and those who received poorer grades.

Australian Education Union Victorian branch president Meredith Peace welcomed the news, saying ATAR thresholds would attract the highest quality teachers.

"You can't allow entry standards to drop to an all time low and continue to put pressure on schools to achieve the highest student outcomes," she said.

Monash University also supported the ATAR threshold - although it already requires a clearly-in ATAR of 85 for its teaching courses.

But Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Greg Craven – who chaired the federal government's teacher education ministerial advisory group – said ATARs were a crude measure of whether someone would be a good teacher.

And he said that the state government risked "annihilating the teacher workforce" unless there was a variety of alternative entry schemes.

"The end result will be teacher shortages and enormous class sizes," he said.

Professor Craven said 73 per cent of people who enter teaching courses in Victoria via their ATAR do not have a raw rank of 70.

In New South Wales, where similar ATAR thresholds have been introduced, the number of students enrolled in undergraduate teacher education courses has fallen by about 10 per cent.

There is currently an oversupply of almost 2000 primary and secondary teachers in Victoria, but there are shortages in fields like high school maths, science and languages.

The state government will also introduce 60 new teaching scholarships a year for regional and disadvantaged students and establish a new rural teaching academy in Gippsland.

Less than 25 per cent of students start teaching courses via their ATAR, with the bulk of students already having completed a university degree.