Federal education minister says ‘dud teachers’ not an issue in Australia’s PRIVATE schools

Huge incorrectness.  A man who states the obvious

Stuart Robert has said independent schools do not accept “dud teachers”, sending the “bottom 10% of teachers dragging the chain” into the government system, where they are protected from being fired.

The acting education minister made the remarks at an independent schools conference on Thursday, revealing the federal government will aim to lift teacher standards by revamping course content and bringing forward the initial literacy and numeracy test for teachers.

Although there were no “silver bullets”, Robert said, teacher quality came “screaming out” as the most important fix, as studies showed that bringing the bottom 10% of teachers up to the standard of the average would reverse the decline.

“Now, I don’t think that’s a problem in your schools, because frankly you can hire and fire your own teachers,” he told the Independent Schools Australia and Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia national education forum.

Referring to the principal of his alma mater, Rockhampton grammar, Robert said there was “no way … Dr Moulds would accept a dud teacher in his school, like, for a second”.

“So for your school you just don’t have them – you don’t have the bottom 10% of teachers dragging the chain,” he said.  “But for every teacher you don’t have in your organisation, guess where they go?”

Robert said there were teachers who graduated from university who “can’t read and write”, evidenced by the fact they could not pass the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students (Lantite).  “If you can’t perform in basic literacy and numeracy, how can you teach children?” he said.

The Australian Education Union president, Correna Haythorpe, said Robert’s comments “are absolutely shameful and can only be viewed as insulting to the dedicated, high quality public school teaching workforce”.

The Queensland education minister, Grace Grace, said the comments were “outrageous, inaccurate, and an insult to hard working teachers across Queensland and Australia”.

The Victorian education minister, James Merlino, said it was “a disgrace” that Robert had attacked government school teachers and accused the Coalition of “obsessing about culture wars” about the curriculum.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/mar/17/stuart-robert-says-dud-teachers-not-an-issue-in-australias-independent-schools