Stuart Robert said private schools did not have the teacher quality issue, prompting the education union to accuse him of failing to prioritise public education.
Acting federal Education Minister Stuart Robert has blamed “dud teachers” for the decline in the academic results of Australian students while praising independent schools for employing only quality teachers and delivering a model example of education.
“The problem is the protection of teachers that don’t want to be there; that aren’t up to the right standard; that are graduating from university or have been for the last 10 years and they can’t read and write.” “You don’t have the bottom 10 per cent of teachers dragging the chain. But for every teacher you don’t have in your organisation, guess where they go?”
“What is beyond dispute is the disparity in total funding and resources available to schools across different sectors, which has the most impact on outcomes,” he said. Mr Robert said the federal government would seek to lift teacher quality by exercising control over the content of university teaching courses, which he said would be linked to government funding. He told the forum he wanted to see the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education students moved forward to the first week of the first year of education degrees.
“Negative rhetoric about teachers has the effect of deterring the best potential teachers,” she added.