By Adam Carey
This year’s crop of teaching graduates will be allowed to enter the profession with 25 per cent less classroom experience than their predecessors, in an effort to prevent COVID-19 causing a teacher shortage.
The Victorian government will slash the number of professional experience days students must spend inside a school classroom from 80 days to 60 for undergraduates, and from 60 days to 45 for graduate students.
The changes will run until the end of 2020, even though Victoria has committed to remote learning only until the end of term two in June.
Students are being deprived of practical experience this term because of remote learning, meaning graduates might struggle to fulfil the usual number of days of practical experience required to be registered.
Victorian Education Minister James Merlino said the government was adjusting placement and registration requirements to make it easier for teachers to do their work during the pandemic.
“With many students now learning from home, teaching students and current teachers will not be able to undertake the practical training they usually need to, to enter or stay in the teaching force,” Mr Merlino said.
“These changes in practical training will ensure fairness for prospective teachers and our current teachers.”
The union for teachers in government schools said the reduced requirement would help ward off a potential teacher drought next year.
“We know we are in a period of growth and we need to have a ready and constant supply of new teachers coming through to replace people who retire as well as dealing with that growth,” said Meredith Peace, Victorian branch president of the Australian Education Union.
“We don’t want to be in a position where we run short of the number of teachers that are needed because students can’t get the number of practical days.”
Victoria was on track to experience a shortage of secondary teachers in each year between 2019 and 2023, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Department of Education and Training’s most recent data, from 2017.
The Victorian Institute of Teaching will assess if those graduates who have qualified with a reduced number of hours in the classroom have met all graduate teacher standards and are ready to enter the teaching profession.
There will be no easing of the academic standards students must meet. The minimum ATAR for entry to teaching courses will remain at 70 and teaching graduates will still have to pass the literacy and numeracy test for initial teacher education to qualify.
Ten per cent of graduates did not pass the test in 2018, meaning they were blocked from entering the profession.