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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Thursday, 26 August 2004) . . Page.. 4304 ..

teaching is a good career, that it is a good profession, that it is something that offers a future for people going into the work force or people seeking to change careers.

I think that often people get the impression from a lot of what they read in the newspapers that teaching must be a miserable career choice. I do not believe that that is the case. I know that people who are working in the profession, while they have complaints about things within their job, would not change what they are doing and do love it. I commend them for that and I think that that is a message that we need to get out to the community.

The committee recommended in recommendation 14 that the Department of Education and Training review the current induction and mentoring program for teachers, with a view to extending the program from two to five years. I think that it is very important to do that. The committee members heard anecdotally and saw in the figures that came to the committees that lots of teachers are leaving the profession within the first five years of having completed their university studies.

It seems like a waste of resources to have somebody study for four years to get a job in the profession and then leave after less than five years in the job. (Extension of time granted.) It is important to support new teachers. That is not always easily done. I think that the mentoring program that exists is a good one, but the committee would like to see it extended that little bit further to make sure that we are not losing the new blood that is coming in and that those people who are coming in are staying and developing their expertise so that they can go into the middle teaching roles and enhance their qualifications.

Recommendation 15 relates to the government establishing a teacher registration board as a matter of priority and making registration a compulsory requirement for all teachers in the ACT as soon as practicable. New South Wales is the only state and the ACT is the only territory that do not have a compulsory requirement concerning the registration of teachers. The committee did not focus on this area in a major way, but it did come up as an issue with a number of the people to whom the committee spoke in the course of the inquiry. For the sake of making sure that our school students are protected and for the sake of protecting the people within the profession, it is important to look at doing that.

In the final recommendation, No 16, the committee recommended that the Department of Education and Training monitor the work of the New South Wales Teachers Institute with regard to professional support and ongoing professional development of the teaching profession. I think that that is self-explanatory.

I might get a bit political here and say that the committee was bemused by the decision of the current federal government to provide money for a national centre for teaching excellence to be set up at the Australian National University. The reason it was bemused is that the Australian National University, as members would know, does not train teachers. How it would suddenly have the expertise to say what is excellence in teaching is a bit of a mystery. That is a bit of a barrier or a bit of hurdle that it will have to overcome in the first place, which is unfortunate. I am sure that there was more than one other applicant for that role and I know that what happened came as a surprise to some in the education community, but I welcome the fact that a centre for teacher excellence has been set up.

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