Dr WASHER (2:54 PM) —My question is addressed to the Minister for Education, Science and Training. Is the minister aware of concerns about the standard of teacher training? What is the government doing to lift educational standards? Are there any alternative policies?

Dr NELSON (Minister for Education, Science and Training) —I thank the member for Moore for his question. He, like all of us who are parents, would know that, apart from we who are parents, the most important people in the lives of our children are their teachers. So Australians would have been quite disturbed today when they read on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald a headline which said, ‘Teachers told: prove you can read and write’. In fact, the story reports on a national inquiry that I commissioned a year ago into the teaching of reading in Australian schools and how Australian teachers are taught how to teach our children to read. The Sydney Morning Herald today said that this report that I am about to receive is ‘scathing about the competence of student teachers, citing evidence that many lack “the literacy skill required to be effective teachers of reading”’. Annah Healy, the coordinator of literacy in primary education at the Queensland University of Technology, in the same article said:

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This report follows a growing and substantial body of evidence that there is a serious problem in the training of Australia’s teachers. That is not a criticism of teachers, but it is a criticism of the way in which they are being trained. No teacher can teach what he or she has not been taught to do. We know that, at the moment, one in 10 people training to be a teacher at the University of Tasmania is undergoing a remedial reading program. We know that only one in six students at the Australian Defence Force Academy, who need to have very high entry scores to get in, can achieve a 70 per cent proficiency in basic grammar. We know that 56 per cent of those training to be teachers, in a study at the Queensland University of Technology, could not identify a syllable. As Dr Healy said in today’s Sydney Morning Herald article, ‘How on earth would they cope if they ever had to help a child with language difficulties?’

The battle for Australia’s international competitiveness is going to be fought, and indeed won or lost, in Australia’s schools. We know that about 30 per cent of Australian children are leaving the school system today functionally illiterate. The government are determined to see that there will be reforms in Australian universities, particularly in education faculties. We have established, at a cost of $30 million, a national institute for quality teaching to oversee this process. By the time this government have finished with teacher training, those who go into training to be teachers not only will be tested on literacy and numeracy but will be tested on the way out. Our children need it and our country’s future relies on it.