Page 3344 - Week 09 - Thursday, 22 August 2019
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The government is conscious that any administrative burden and cost of a framework like this should be minimised, so there will be no fee or charge required for pre-service teacher approval and registration.
The second major amendment, as Ms Berry has explained, is the strengthening of requirements for teachers to have, as a minimum, a four-year teaching qualification. The ACT government knows that having well-trained and knowledgeable teachers provides the foundation for a strong, high-quality education system. During the four years of pre-service study, teachers develop a thorough knowledge of the content they will go on to teach and a solid understanding of teaching practices that are proven to make a difference to student learning.
As a complement to the amendments to the act around teacher qualifications, the future of education strategy sets out two initiatives to enhance practice and maximise learning impact for every child in the ACT. The first is the government’s vision for a highly accomplished or lead teacher in every government school. These teachers are known as HALTs. Certification recognises and promotes the development of collaborative learning professionals who strive to continually reflect upon and improve their practice. It opens up a wealth of career possibilities for the HALTs, without them having to leave the classroom. Certification empowers them to lead the profession towards better outcomes for teachers and learners everywhere.
The second is scoping the enhancement of the role of the Teacher Quality Institute to share excellent practice and contemporary research evidence across the ACT, giving the institute an administrative framework to provide the best and latest evidence on teaching and learning, and spread success across all ACT schools.
Research is central to the third amendment focus of the bill that we are debating today, amendments allowing the ACT Teacher Quality Institute to collect information about the teacher workforce to inform national and ACT teacher workforce planning. There are important changes occurring in the demand for teachers, the nature of the existing teacher workforce and the cohort of students being prepared to become teachers. Under these circumstances it is essential that we have accurate and reliable data for workforce planning and a good understanding of developments and trends that will shape the teacher workforce of the future.
The overarching challenge is to ensure that Australia, and in particular the ACT, has the numbers of future teachers it requires and is not training too few or too many teachers; that we have teachers in the areas in which they will be required, geographically, by stage of schooling and by subject specialisation; and that we work to ensure that Australia’s future teaching workforce is drawn from the best and brightest of our school leavers.
The Teacher Quality Institute Amendment Bill, in short, is about building the quality of ACT teachers, starting from when the teachers are in training and continuing throughout the teacher’s career. It is about the ACT building the right workforce to provide progress in learning for every student every day. I commend the bill to the Assembly.
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