Plan to recruit our best and brightest

Ongoing improvements in educational performance in Australian schools depend on continual improvements in the quality of classroom teaching. And one of the key ways to achieve this is by ensuring the provision of a high-quality teaching workforce.

ACER Chief Executive, Professor Geoff Masters AO, writing in Teacher, addressed this issue with reference to The Teacher Workforce in Australia: Supply, demand and data issues report written by ACER Senior Research Fellow Dr Paul Weldon and released in March by the Centre for Education Policy and Practice at ACER.

Professor Masters said the supply of teachers in Australia is not currently well matched to demand.

‘The overarching challenge is to ensure that Australia has the numbers of future teachers it requires and is not training too few or too many teachers; that we have teachers in the areas in which they will be required – geographically, by stage of schooling and by subject specialisation; and that we work to ensure Australia’s future teaching workforce is drawn from the best and brightest of our school leavers.’

Read the full article:

‘Planning a stronger teacher workforce’, written by Geoff Masters and published in Teacher, is available at < teacher.acer.edu.au/geoff-masters >