Preliminary data collected from Tertiary Admissions Centres show applications to ITE courses in 2026 have jumped by 6.5 per cent and domestic undergraduate university offers by 6.3 per cent in the last year.
This compares to a 7 per cent increase in applications and a 14 per cent increase in offers from 2024-2025.
The latest uptick follows a concerted effort to address the teacher shortage crisis impacting schools across the country, with the Federal Government working with state and territory governments to deliver the National Teacher Workforce Action Plan.
The Plan has five priority areas, including improving teacher supply, ‘strengthening’ initial teacher education, and ‘keeping the teachers we have’.
The Government’s ‘Be That Teacher’ campaign has aimed to raise the status of the teaching profession, but drew a critical response from some teachers when it launched in 2023.
Dr Saul Karnovsky, a senior teacher educator and researcher from Curtin University argued that the $10 million ‘glossy marketing strategy’ complete with its series of ‘saccharine’ videos was fundamentally misplaced, arguing the campaign failed to address the specific issues which led to the teacher shortage in the first place.
“In order to stem the tide the tide of teacher attrition, policy reforms must focus less on attracting newcomers to the profession and more on retaining those currently teaching,” he wrote in an AARE article.
“They can do this by radically rethinking teacher workload. As a starting point they must unburden teachers from unnecessary administration.
“If we do not address the root causes of why teachers are leaving, even newcomers will not stay long in the job and the funds from these expensive government campaigns will be wasted,” he concluded.
Nevertheless, the Government reports that the campaign has attracted more than 67,000 views on its home page and more than 23 million completed views of the video shared on social media.
Delivering his well-worn line in response to the new admissions data, Clare said it reflected a ‘team effort’.
“This is good news. Teaching is the most important job in the world and we need more of them.
“When we were elected the number of people studying teaching was going down. Now it’s going up,” Clare said.
In 2023, the Strong Beginnings report signalled issues with the retention of both aspiring teachers in undergraduate courses and with new graduates in schools.
“Sadly, too many fail to complete their studies or stay in the profession long enough to flourish,” the report warned.
“Nearly four in 10 ITE students leave their course within six years of commencing their degree and around one in five beginning teachers leaves within the first three years of entering the teaching profession.”
A range of initiatives tackling teacher workload and pay have been implemented in many states and territories over the past three years.
Teaching scholarships worth up to $40,000 each have been re-introduced in a bid to lure more people into courses, and paid prac placements have also been put in place.
“This year the biggest reforms to teacher training in a generation also kick off.
“This includes changes to the core content of what students are taught to better prepare them to teach children to read and write and count, and give them the skills they need to manage classroom behaviour,” Clare added.
ITE in Australia has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, with commentators and researchers declaring a constructivist ‘ideological bias’ amongst academics has left graduate teachers without a solid grounding in evidence-based teaching approaches or sound behaviour management skills.
Last year a controversial policy paper went so far as to propose initial teacher education should be removed from universities and handed over to a small group of national training institutions.
In October, EducationHQ reported that Australian school leaders were faced with devoting huge resources to undoing everything that beginner teachers had been taught at university.
Speaking at the Australian School Improvement Summit, Manisha Gazula, principal at Marsden Road Public School in Sydney’s south-west, principal Dr Greg Ashman from Ballarat Clarendon College and principal Sue Knight from Ararat West Primary School in Victoria agreed that initial teacher education, bar for a few notable exceptions, actually made their jobs harder.
Gazula said new graduates who came to Marsden Road needed to be retrained from scratch before they could effectively teach a class.
“I don’t think they know how to explicitly teach reading, or elements of reading comprehension.
“They don’t know how explicit teaching looks in a vocabulary lesson.
“They don’t know how explicit teaching looks in a maths lesson; I don’t think the university is preparing them for those,” the principal lamented.
Ashman said he would rather employ somebody who had completed a biology degree to be a science teacher in his school rather than a candidate that had just done two years of teaching training.
Broadly speaking, our ITE courses offer little value for aspiring teachers or schools, the school leader argued.
“Generally, people that have had teacher training in Australia, they’re not taught much about classroom management, how to manage a classroom, how to organise routines, that sort of thing…
“They don’t tend to be taught much cognitive science. There’s a lot of sociology-based stuff, quite a lot of inclusion which is really important but possibly not to the extent that it forms that [amount] of the curriculum,” he added.
Clare maintained that when it comes to the number of people keen to pursue a career in teaching, we are “starting to see this turn around”.
“I want more young people to leap out of high school and want to become a teacher, rather than a lawyer or a banker,” he stated.
