Announcement of Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group

E&OE TRANSCRIPT Sunrise Christian School, Marion, SA 19 February 2014 Subjects: Teacher education and training – Announcement of Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group; Channel Seven Raid; Craig Thompson; Alcoa CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well thank you all very much for coming this morning to this very important announcement of the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG). I’m very pleased to be here at the Marion campus of the Sunrise Christian School, an organisation with whom I’ve had a long involvement as the local Member for Sturt, where they also have a campus. I’m pleased to be here with Andrew Southcott, my colleague, the Member for Boothby, and the candidate for Elder, Carolyn Habib, who is obviously trying to wrest that seat away from Labor at the coming state election. And particularly with Professor Greg Craven, who is the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, and is going to be the Chairman of the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group. All the evidence that is produced about what makes a difference to a child’s education points to teacher quality as the number one determinant of what produces good outcomes for students. There are many different features. Obviously autonomy is one, parental engagement is another, the curriculum and what we’re teaching students is another, the backgrounds of students, the schools they go to. But all the evidence particularly points in Australia to teacher quality. And as recently as December the OECD released another report which showed that in Australia, of all countries in the OECD, the classroom that a student was allocated was the most important determinant of their outcomes in any one year. In other words, the teacher who taught a particular student was the most important feature of the outcomes for that student. So we in the last election said that we would have a very relentless focus on teacher quality, and the one area where the Federal Government can influence teacher quality is at the training level at university. Because obviously we don’t fund any schools, we don’t own any schools, we don’t fund any teachers, we don’t employ teachers. But we do have a big role in university teacher training. So today I am announcing that there’ll be a Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group. It’s made up of eight different experts in the field, two of whom are here today. Trevor Fletcher, who is the award-winning principal of the Fleurieu Primary School, which I visited last year on World Teacher Day, and has a long history in terms of school reform, in New South Wales and South Australia. And also Professor Greg Craven whom I’ve already mentioned. And the other members of the group are in the media pack that is being handed out to you, but they are a broad range of experts across the field. Some of them very well known, others less well known. They include linguistics experts because the Coalition wants to have a focus on languages. A mathematics expert because we want to boost the number of science and maths teachers, technology and engineering teachers coming out of our universities. The overall thrust of this is to get better outcomes for students. For a long time, the anecdotal evidence, surveys and research have shown neither the students coming out of university, the principals who are employing them, or even the Year 12 students choosing teaching at university, are happy or satisfied with the offerings at university. One of the jobs of the TEMAG will be to have a benchmark study of world best practice in teacher training. And there is absolutely no reason at all why Australia as one of the wealthiest countries in the world, one of the most sophisticated economies in the world, shouldn’t have the best teacher training in the world. So old shibboleths will be cast aside, there’ll be a relentless focus on the outcomes for students and that means the kind of training that we give to our teachers at university. I want it to be more practical, I want them to have better experiences in the classroom rather than in universities and I want it to be less theoretical. I think some of those pointers are what I have heard in the last five years as either the Shadow Minister or the Minister for Education. So after that long introduction I might ask my colleague Andrew Southcott to say a few words, and then Greg Craven, the new Chairman of the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group would like to say a few words too. ANDREW SOUTHCOTT: Thank you very much Christopher and welcome to the Sunrise School. Welcome to the electorate of Boothby. It’s great to be here, great to also have the principal, Lee Avery. Christopher, as he said in his remarks, he was the shadow minister for education for five years. I had the opportunity to work with him during that time and he came up with a lot of ideas. And I think teacher education is one of the under-done areas in Australian education. The Sunrise School, of course, one of the issues we had during the Building the Education Revolution was this is a multi-campus school and I was able to raise with Christopher, and Christopher raised it with the then Education Minister Julia Gillard to say that this school should be able to access BER money for each of their campuses. We also have seen a lot of building at this school, going back to the Howard Government. I was very pleased to be able to open a building here in 2006. So it’s great to have Christopher here, it’s great to hear about this new initiative to make sure that our teachers are even better. CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well done. Greg, would you like to … GREG CRAVEN: Thank you Minister. Can I just say I am certainly very proud to be appointed to this. I totally agree with the Minister when he says he wants to work with universities to make teaching courses more rigorous and attractive and that strong and capable leadership is going to be vital at schools. And let’s face it; education is the key to our future because it’s the key to increasing productivity. I think that everybody is agreed that teaching is a good thing and that teachers are a good thing. I remember my Year 12 English teacher Mrs Cannon taught me to think so she has a lot to be responsible for. And I have an 18 year old son who is studying teaching and he certainly has a lot to be responsible for. I think we have to look carefully at schools. Our education system is a good system – it’s not a shambles – but it deserves to be improved. And that’s really what this inquiry, this exercise, is going to be about. We really need to work out ways of embedding both practice and theory. Students who are learning teaching need to have their subject knowledge, be able to impart that knowledge, deal laterally with different types of classrooms and they’re entitled to get a demonstration of their craft and a mentor and the ability to put theory into practice. And all of those things are required; none of those things are optional. So I look very much forward to working with my colleagues on this group towards making Australia’s teacher training and education system even better. CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Thanks Greg. QUESTION: Professor, can we ask, what’s actually wrong with the system? And does it need a broom to go completely through it? GREG CRAVEN: No, I don’t think it needs a broom to go through it. I think it’s like any house. You can always improve the painting in the bathroom and you can always find the things that need to be looked at. We know, for example that we haven’t got enough science and maths teachers. We know, for example that we haven’t got enough language teachers. We know that, in a lot of areas in the world, there are great things being done to bring theory and practice together. Teaching is a vocation and a craft. It’s not a science. It takes a heart and head. It takes practicality and it takes knowledge. There are opportunities to improve something that is already at a relatively high level. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be improved. QUESTION: But isn’t it indirectly a bit of a slap in the face to the current teaching profession if you say, well it’s not good enough? GREG CRAVEN: I don’t think anybody is saying that it’s not good enough. What we’re saying is that it’s so good, it can be even better. And that Australia has a great history. We all remember our great teachers, but the way we have had great teachers is because we have had a culture of continuous improvement. And this is a key step in that culture of continuous improvement. This is working with teachers and with schools because we know they are experts but it doesn’t mean that we can’t get even better at what we do. QUESTION: (inaudible) across the board are we talking humanities or are we talking science or mathematics? Where do we fall down or where is the greatest potential area of improvement? GREG CRAVEN: I think any great system of endeavour, whether it is private enterprise, government or education becomes great because it constantly looks at itself and that’s what this is about. So this is an opportunity I think to have a look across the board where no options are off the table and to identify good practice. Things that we do good, and to roll that out more widely, things that are not so good, and to make them better. CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Perhaps I could also give you some examples. I mean there was a survey conducted by the Australian Education Union and it showed that 39 percent of respondents, these were teachers, beginning teachers, rated their pre-service teaching education as merely satisfactory – 39 percent. While 27 percent rated it as either poor or very poor. Eighty two percent of beginning teachers did not think their training had prepared them for dealing with difficult parents and colleagues. Sixty nine percent thought their training did not provide an adequate grounding to teach particular groups of students. Such as students with disabilities or non-English speaking background students. And 72 percent felt that it hadn’t prepared them adequately for teaching Indigenous students. In a speech I gave to the Sydney Institute in July 2012 I also referred to a survey of principals, which showed they weren’t satisfied with the initial teachers that were coming out of teacher training. They had to do a great deal of work on a practical basis to impart the skills to new teachers about how to teach literacy and numeracy. And there was another survey I referred to in that speech of Year 12 students who when asked why they chose to do teaching had responded along the lines of it was easy, that it wouldn’t extend or challenge them and it was basically one of their last choices. Now I agree with Greg that teaching is a vocation. Some would say politics is a vocation. Teaching is also a vocation and that means that we want our teachers to be as well trained as possible and to want to go into teaching not because it’s say third or fourth choice, but because it’s their first choice. Now the states can work on remuneration and conditions, and their schools. I can work as a Federal Minister on training at universities. So rather than talk about things that I can’t control, we want to do something that we can work on. That’s why we are setting up this particular group. It will advise me hopefully by the end of the year if not earlier and then we’ll work with the universities to try and bring about a culture of change. Because often universities can’t say that their own child is unattractive and therefore they’ll potentially say they don’t need to change. But obviously teachers, students and principals are telling us, and there needs to be changes. QUESTION: Minister the unions also pointed out today I believe that while you want these improved candidates coming through schools and into tertiary levels for teaching, have you decided on a threshold there yet in terms of academic standards as they make that leap? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well I’m not obsessed about ATAR scores, I think it’s a very blunt instrument. About half the people who go to university these days don’t enter on the basis of their ATAR score. So it’s a very glib line to simply say if we have a minimum cut off of ATAR scores somehow that will fix every problem. That’s not the problem. There are many people with low ATAR scores who, given the appropriate support, both before they start university and during their university training can be excellent professionals and teachers. So I’m not obsessed with ATAR scores and I think it’s just an easy way of giving a line-off without actually addressing the fundamental issues in the teaching profession. QUESTION: Will this panel also look at interviewing students looking to study teaching? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well I assume it’ll have a very wide-ranging consultative process. They have time, they’ll get strong support from the Department of Education in terms of a secretariat for them, and they will consult very widely and I would assume a lot of people will want to give their opinions to the ministerial advisory group. One of the things about education is that everyone’s been to school and about 40 per cent of Australians have been to university, so everybody has an opinion about it and I would hope that as many as they would want to, would share it with them. QUESTION: If you’re the Minister doing an assessment of the national curriculum, why would you have two processes now with the importance of a ministerial advisory group? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Because they’re two very different aspects of the jigsaw puzzle. What we teach students, which is the national curriculum, is a different part of the education process than who teaches them and how well trained they are. So, they’re quite separate strains. And the third strain of course is principal autonomy and giving schools more local control, that’s different again. And finally for the Coalition, our Students First policy is about parental engagement and about genuinely engaging parents in their children’s education. Not serving in the tuckshop, although there’s nothing wrong with serving in the tuckshop, but being involved in a real way in the child when they come home from school, talking to them about their homework, helping them with their homework. I mean it’s horrifying as the Minister for Education, as the Shadow Minister, to have heard over the past few years that some parents, once the child gets home from school, never ask them about school, never ask them about whether they have any homework. Whereas parents need to be deeply engaged in that aspect of their child’s life. QUESTION: Minister, if I may ask you on another topic how does your Government justify armed police raiding Channel Seven’s offices and terrorising staff yesterday when Seven had complied with every request for information by the Australian Federal Police? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well that’s a good question Mark, but I’m not the person to answer it. The person to answer that is the Attorney-General. QUESTION: Do you personally think that it was a prudent measure by the AFP? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well I’m not responsible for the AFP. George Brandis and Michael Keenan have particular responsibilities and… QUESTION: Funnily enough he doesn’t want to talk to us about it. CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well they’re the only ones who can really answer that question. I’m responsible for education… QUESTION: You don’t personally think that it’s an assault on the freedom of the press? The freedom of the media? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Look, there are lots of issues that need to be dealt with today and I’m happy to talk to you about it privately but that question should be responded to on behalf of the Government by the people responsible for it which is the Attorney-General or the Minister for Justice. QUESTION: As a personal view do you think that the Government’s, what was the attack on the ABC, has now extended to the commercial media as a result of yesterday? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well there is no attack on the ABC from the Federal Government. We love the ABC. QUESTION: There have been unkind words spoken by the Prime Minister. Is this your Government’s overall view of how it’s going to deal with the media and things it doesn’t like about the media? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: It’s a very long bow and the answer is no. We have a very robust free media in Australia and so we should and sometimes that’s good for politicians and sometimes it’s not good for politicians, but as we’ve seen with Craig Thomson – the media scrutiny of his role as Secretary of the Health Services Union hasn’t turned out very well for him – them’s the breaks. You know, we have a free press in Australia and we should always have one. QUESTION: Is it a good look with armed police going into the offices of a media organisation, just storming through the door and terrorising staff? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well I don’t want to make light of it, the best person to answer these questions is the person responsible for it. QUESTION: So you’re ducking for cover on this? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, the best person to answer these questions is George Brandis, Michael Keenan or the Prime Minister. QUESTION: [inaudible]…in the past you have spoken on various topics, especially if they are to do with the opposition, but you are not prepared to enter into this debate? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well today I am focused very much on teacher education. QUESTION: Going back to Craig Thompson, what is your reaction to him being found guilty? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well there are three things that Bill Shorten needs to do today. He needs to apologise to the Australian people for being the leader of a political party that harboured Craig Thompson for years, that did everything to hang on to his vote in Parliament House because of the hung parliament, and defended and supported him. So on behalf of the Labor Party, as its federal leader, he needs to apologise for the protection racket that was run around Craig Thompson to protect him for three years, in the last parliament. He certainly needs to indicate whether he’ll give bipartisan support to a Privileges Committee investigation of whether Craig Thompson deliberately lied to the parliament when he made his statement last year. And if he is prepared to give bipartisan support to that, we’ll consider moving that motion, but if he’s not going to, if he’s going to continue to protect Craig Thompson, we’re not going to allow this to become a partisan issue. And thirdly, he needs to pass the Registered Organisations Commission legislation, which is sitting in the Senate being blocked by Labor, which would investigate and stop exactly the kind of practices that Craig Thompson undertook as a Secretary of the Health Services Union. If he’s not prepared to do those three things, then Bill Shorten has yet again failed the test of leadership. QUESTION: Will you be asked to front the Privileges Committee? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I don’t know why I’d be asked to front the Privileges Committee – no I didn’t say anything to the parliament about Craig Thompson’s – in his statement. It’s a bit of a long bow, but nonetheless, no I doubt it. QUESTION: Minister on the subject matter here today, you make the point that you want teacher education to be less theoretical – the approach to be less theoretical. Is that what you mean by the ‘faddish’ nature of some education? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well one of the criticisms of the… QUESTION: What are these fads that you refer to? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: One of the criticisms of the teacher education in Australia is that some students in some courses can emerge into the teaching profession with as little as a month or three months of practical, in-the-classroom training. And then there are others where students are in the classroom in their first week of starting a teaching degree at a university in Australia. Now that is a very wide divergence of experiences and I want the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group to advise me on which one is better. My instinct is that the more a teacher is in the classroom learning on the job about how to teach people how to count and to read, the better. But I’m not the expert on education that these ladies and gentlemen are, so I look forward to their response. QUESTION: The other point, I believe in an Op Ed, you said today, that some schools might have a tendency to just usher everyone through with a pass grade however minimal. Do you know which these schools are? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: The evidence is that very few people fail teaching degrees, and I think that points perhaps to a tendency to simply accept a lower standard rather than aim for a higher standard. QUESTION: And what’s your evidence for that? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: That’s the expert evidence that I’ve been handed as the Minister for Education and read about over the last five years, and talked to teachers and academics about over a long period of time. I don’t think much of this is news to the general public. As a father of four children in schools, there’s a wide divergence of experiences, in terms of teacher performance. And we want – the Coalition wants - to be the best friend of teachers so that we have the best professional development for teachers who are currently in the workforce, and the best training for new teachers who are coming into the workforce, because our overwhelming desire is to put students first, and to get their outcomes as well as they possibly can achieve. QUESTION: (inaudible)…do you think the business with Alcoa announcing a shutdown will affect the Government’s popularity in any way? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Labor gave $40 million to Alcoa two years ago and now they’ve announced they’re closing down. A lot of people will question whether Labor wasted taxpayers’ money, $40 million in a business that has closed down. What Labor needs to do is support the Coalition’s proposals to improve the economy – abolish the carbon tax, review the renewable energy target, abolish the mining tax, cut red tape and regulation, support fast-tracking development and infrastructure, bring back the Australian Building and Construction Commission, pass the savings in the Senate, $5 billion of which are Labor’s savings which they’re now inexplicably opposing their own savings. These are the measures that will get the economy growing, to get growth in the economy and to ensure that jobs are being produced in Australia. Labor is actually standing in the way at the moment of fixing the problem that they created. Ends