The New South Wales education minister has called on universities to cap their intake of student teachers, labelling slipping admissions standards as a business model aimed at allowing them to “rake in money”.
With figures revealing that some universities are admitting students with Atar ranks below 50 into education degrees, Adrian Piccoli called on the federal government to act before Friday’s Council of Australian Governments meeting of federal, state and territory education ministers.
But the vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University has branded his comments “rampant elitism” and a “complete fiction”.
Piccoli accused universities of having a “business model of taking in as many students as they can into low-cost courses and they rake in the money”, the Australian reported.
“A cap like they use for medicine degrees can lead to a higher standard of teaching,” he said. “I receive a lot of anecdotal feedback from school principals who are questioning the quality of education students at university.”
An Atar below 50 means a student performed worse than 50% of the students they studied with. It is estimated that just over 1,000 students with Atars below 50 were accepted this year into education degrees.
The lowest publicised Atar cut-off in the country is 60, offered by the Australian Catholic University’s primary education and combined teaching degrees and the University of Canberra’s bachelor of secondary education.
But universities frequently accept students below the publicised cut-offs, with the ACU and Macquarie University’s teaching courses estimated to have admitted up to 34% and 55% of students below the cut-off, respectively.
The vice-chancellor of the ACU, Prof Greg Craven, has been a consistent critic of the attempt to cap admissions and said Piccoli’s comments were “a complete fiction that is politically useful”.
“Students need all sorts of things to be teachers, both academic and personal qualities,” he said. “You need to prove that people with higher Atars are good teachers and those with lower Atars are bad teachers. No study has been undertaken. There just isn’t any evidence.”
Craven claimed that ACU graduates had a 92% employment rate across the country and called Piccoli’s push “rampant elitism”. “If you close that kind of Atar down, Indigenous, rural and low-SES [socio-economic status] students are the kind of people who won’t become teachers.”
In Feburary the chief executive of Universities Australia, Belinda Robinson warned that capping “would reduce opportunities for people from disadvantaged backgrounds”, while the deputy vice-chancellor of the University of New South Wales said students from low socioeconomic backgrounds “tend to have an Atar ranking that underestimates their true academic potential”.
Last year NSW became the first state to set minimum entry standards for teaching degrees, requiring students to achieve band 5 results in three HSC subjects. Victoria has followed suit with a 75 minimum Atar.
This year the state also introduced a requirement that education students demonstrate they are in the top 30% of the population for literacy and numeracy before they can graduate. The test – to be rolled out nationally – can be taken again if students fail.
Piccoli described the minimum standard as “a bit of a blunt instrument but the best instrument we’ve got”. “The cleaner approach would be for the commonwealth to impose caps,” he said. “That way you get away from using Atar scores and universities can use an interview, aptitude test or whatever method they like.”
Prof Robyn Ewing from the Univeristy of Sydney said it was “problematic” that the minister’s comments ignored the process of teacher training.
“We definitely need high-quality teachers but only looking at the Atar is not the whole story and is not necessarily going to solve some of the issues that we have,” she said. “A large majority of those who go into teacher education don’t come straight from school with their Atar. Only roughly a quarter come through that way.”
Piccoli’s comments come days before a meeting of Coag’s education council. The federal education minister, Simon Birmingham, will meet the education ministers of every Australian state and territory
The minister confirmed he would be raising the issue at Coag as an area that requires reform.
