Teachers don’t need to be Einsteins – Garrett
TEACHERS don’t need to be smart or gifted as long as they are passionate, says federal School Education Minister Peter Garrett.
Mr Garrett was responding yesterday (Tuesday) to plans by the New South Wales Government to consider ways of lifting professional standards and make it easier to fire underperforming teachers (see story this section, Govt wants it easier to sack teachers).
Mr Garrett says he doesn’t think the teaching profession needs to be more selective.
“It is not necessarily a fact that someone who is academically smart makes a better teacher than someone who isn’t,” Mr Garrett told journalists in Canberra.
“I don’t think education should necessarily be the province of the particularly smart or gifted.”
Mr Garrett says he knew teachers who weren’t the most academically gifted but nevertheless went on to be great because they had passion and enthusiasm for the children they taught.
NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli says university entrance scores for people studying teaching are sometimes too low.
Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) scores range from less than 50 to the high 90s, Mr Piccoli told journalists in Sydney yesterday, adding that “below 50 is not the kind of score that we want for schoolteachers”.
Mr Piccoli has suggested schools limit training places as a way of combating the national oversupply of new teachers due partly to the federal Government’s decision to deregulate university places.
A NSW discussion paper released yesterday also proposes minimum standards for teaching degrees, including a requirement that students study mathematics, science or a foreign language at secondary school.
But Mr Garrett insists that federal and state education ministers have already agreed to minimum standards for teacher training.
“They ought to ensure, over time, that the teachers that are going into the classrooms will do the job to the best of their ability for their students,” says Mr Garrett, adding that it was important that training institutions provided instruction “across the range of skills that are necessary for teachers”.
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