Bar may be raised for new teachers

Concerns about the falling quality of students wanting to become teachers could result in a set of entry standards being established for training courses across the country.

The standards are one of 11 recommendations in a report compiled following a select-committee inquiry into the scope, standards and provisions of teacher education in New Zealand.

The report, released yesterday, was compiled after taking into account the views of 65 organisations - many of which felt that the rising number of teacher training providers in recent years had led to a significant disparity in the quality of teacher graduates.

Since the deregulation of teacher education in 1990 the number of programmes has grown significantly. There are now 30 providers offering more than 130 different courses, compared with six programmes in 1990.

In its submission to the Education and Science Committee, which compiled the report, the Education Department of the University of Canterbury wrote: "Many students have limited general knowledge, limited vocabularies and some cannot write an adequate sentence or structure their ideas."

The Post Primary Teachers' Association wrote: " ... although the providers may dispute this, there is a widespread belief that the quality of applicants accepted for teacher education courses has declined ... ".

While the report acknowledged the concern about the quality of graduates it found that it was difficult to determine whether standards had improved or declined.

It did, however, recommend that minimum standards for entry into teacher-training courses be introduced and that the standards should be the same at all courses.

The Tertiary Education Commission submitted that instead of entry standards it would be more helpful to have strict exit standards, like in medicine or accounting, which would be a more helpful form of "quality assurance".

NZ Educational Institute assistant secretary Peter Monteith said last night that most training organisations had their own standards but there wasn't a national set of criteria.

"We agree with the necessity for standards and high standards both on entry and exit but we would also like to see that they don't exclude people who are capable of being top teachers but they don't have the qualifications."

To ensure this didn't happen the report recommends a bridging programme to help bring people up to entry standards, the details of which are not yet determined.

Other recommendations include:

* Ensuring primary teachers are capable of teaching the core curriculum to a competent level and that they have the opportunity to specialise in at least one other area.

* Training programmes to help principals who are tasked with recommending whether new teachers should get their full registration from the Teachers Council.

* Greater recognition of prior learning in pre-service programmes.

The recommendations will be considered by Education Minister Trevor Mallard.