The Best Teachers - Australia

This paper, Teaching Talent: The Best Teachers for Australia’s Classrooms (BCA), comprises a paper prepared for the Business Council of Australia titled ‘Investing in Teacher Quality: Doing What Matters Most’, preceded by an introduction and recommendations authored by the BCA .

Key points:

- The quality of teaching is the main driver of successful student learning outcomes.

- Every student deserves teachers who are suited to teaching, well trained and qualified, highly skilled, caring and committed to moving forward the learning of their students.

- One of the main roles of leadership in professions is to build a framework for professional learning from registration to advanced levels of standards, and systems for providing assessments and certification for members who reach those standards. It is important, therefore, to strengthen leadership in quality teaching at the wider professional level as well as at the level of the individual school.

- Stakeholders are unanimous that the first step in achieving improved outcomes in education is to attract the best people into teaching.

- Salary may not be a strong reason why current teachers have chosen to teach, but it is a strong reason why many abler graduates choose not to teach, and this is cause for considerable concern if we want our education system to remain among the best in the world.

- Attracting enough people into teacher education and attracting people of suitable quality are two major issues that tend to work against each other.