Education Minister Stuart Robert has defended his blaming “dud” public school teachers for dragging down academic results, saying his comments were “designed to be provocative”.
Mr Robert made the initial remarks in a speech at a national independent schools conference late last week, in which he said Australia’s international benchmark test results would improve if this “brutal reality” was confronted.
He praised independent schools for employing quality teachers but suggested this sent the “bottom 10 per cent of teachers dragging the chain” into the government system, where they wouldn’t being fired despite not being “up to the right standard”.
Mr Robert has stood by his comments after a storm of controversy that included the Australian Education Union savaging him for what they interpreted as a “deplorable” attack on public school teachers.
“My comments were designed to be provocative to start a conversation about where we need to go,” Mr Robert told 6PR radio on Monday.
“School funding has doubled, but our results have gone backwards. And we have to face that brutal reality: Why?”
He said Australia needed to confront its declining performance in international tests, referring to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test for 15-year-olds living in OECD nations.
The PISA measures a sample of students’ xjmtzywreading, mathematics, and science literacy skills every three years.
In his speech on Thursday, Mr Robert said Australia’s PISA results had dropped in the past 20 years, from fourth to 16th in reading, eighth to 17th in science and 11th to 29th in mathematics.
“This is despite a 42 per cent real increase in funding. Clearly, simply funding education systems does not alone guarantee results,” he told the forum.
Mr Robert on Monday said the Morrison government believed there were two factors behind Australia’s plummeting performance.
One of these reasons was that 10 per cent of teaching graduates were failing the basic numeracy and literacy benchmark test, he said.
The Morrison government will seek to bring forward the literacy and numeracy test for initial teacher education students from the final year of university to the very beginning of one’s course.
“Let’s have a conversation respectfully about how do we improve teacher quality through initial teacher education?” Mr Robert said.
The other priority for the government is to reform what Mr Robert has described as a “very packed” and “busy” school curriculum.
The national curriculum has been under review since June 2020, with the new version yet to be signed off on by the nation’s education ministers.
The draft underwent significant changes at the start of this year, particularly to the humanities and mathematics courses.
The humanities component of the new curriculum is expected to be one of the last subject areas to be finalised after more than a year of “culture wars” debate over its proposed content.
Mr Robert has taken a similar approach to his predecessor in the education portfolio Alan Tudge, in maintaining that Australian students should be taught to be proud of Western values and history.
“We should understand our Indigenous heritage and our strong place in the world but understand how our nation was founded,” Mr Robert said last week.
“I don’t want to teach children in Year 2 to identify a racist statue, I mean are you kidding me? This is nuts.”
