Peter Lyons: Market model for teacher training failed to deliver

COMMENT

Education Minister Trevor Mallard's announcement of a review of teacher training institutions seems to be a belated realisation that the market model has not produced significant improvements in quality.

There has been a competitive market in teacher training for several years. This has led to a proliferation of providers and courses.

Universities and polytechnics have introduced a variety of teacher-training courses in direct competition with colleges of education, the traditional providers of pre-service teacher education.

Government funding for these courses is based on student numbers. Institutions compete to attract students to their courses to gain additional funding.

Institutions providing teacher training face dual conflicting pressures. They need to maintain the commercial viability of their courses while supposedly ensuring quality control over entrants into the teaching profession. When course viability and staffing is on the line, there is an incentive to favour financial realities above quality considerations.

This situation is indicative of the status of teaching as a profession. Accountants, lawyers and doctors have far more rigorous and selective entry requirements into their professions. This is how they ensure their professional status is maintained.

A hallmark of any professional body is that members of the profession have a substantial degree of control over entry standards. This is not the case in teaching.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants is an excellent case study in creating and maintaining a profession. In the late 1980s, with the growth in commerce graduates, the institute introduced a series of professional examinations and a period of supervised practice for aspiring chartered accountants. This ensured that entry to the ranks of accounting was tightly controlled.

This process of gatekeeping is a key characteristic of any professional group - apart from teaching, in which initial selection is left to the various training institutions. Quality control over who can front up in a classroom as a beginning teacher is largely reliant on these institutions.

The idea in creating a market for teacher education was that competition would increase choice for both teacher trainees and schools. If a provider was substandard in terms of its courses and the standard of its graduates, it would be weeded out by competitive pressures.

The problem is that greater choice does not necessarily equate to higher quality. A substandard training institution can also do a great deal of damage before being forced out of the market. Schools are left to sift the pool of graduates from the various institutions. There is also an incentive for institutions to provide their graduates with glowing references to increase their chances of employment, thereby bolstering the placement rates for that institution.

My experience in teacher education confirmed some of these perceptions. At one stage the institution for which I worked admitted a group of Chinese students into the one-year, post-graduate, secondary-teacher course.

They had been recruited from China, having been told that there was a demand for Mandarin teachers in New Zealand high schools. They were required to teach junior maths as their second subject. Their English was limited.

Six weeks after entering the course, these students were on their first school placement. It is not difficult to imagine the experience they had trying to teach a difficult Year 10 maths class in a West Auckland high school.

These students were paying full international student fees with the hope of gaining a New Zealand teaching qualification that would have allowed them to apply for teaching positions here. The attitude of management was caveat emptor - let the buyer beware.

The market model for teacher education is severely flawed. Competition may in fact be detrimental to standards. It also leads to duplication of facilities and courses and the diversion of valuable resources to advertising campaigns and other marketing strategies.

An example of such duplication occurs in Dunedin, where the college of education and the university both provide teacher-training courses within a few hundred metres of each other. Each jealously guards its own turf. Similar situations occur in other major centres. Ultimately, the cost of this replication is borne by the taxpayer and the teacher trainees.

An overhaul of the operation of market forces in teacher training is long overdue. Charging students for the privilege of teaching our children is not the best way to encourage the widest-possible pool of quality applicants to teacher-training courses.

Gaining entry to a teacher-training course should be seen as a notable first step to entry into a professional body. And the main concern of teacher-training institutions should be the quality of their students, staff and courses, not the need to be commercially viable.

* Peter Lyons is a lecturer in foundation studies at Otago University.