Abstract:
Performance indicators and other accountability measures are increasingly common in higher education internationally. In the second of four major reform areas, the Australian Federal Government’s Teacher Education Expert Panel (TEEP) recommended to strengthen the link between performance and funding of initial teacher education (ITE) via (i) the measurement and publication of ITE performance on four categories of indicators, including student selection, student retention, graduate readiness, and the employment outcomes of recent graduates and early career teachers, and (ii) the use of transition, excellence, or compact-based funding as levers for driving quality. While the proposal for the adoption of performance indicators to measure the quality of ITE has since been accepted by Australian Education ministers at the Federal and State level, our inductive content analysis of 56 stakeholder responses revealed a divergence of views on the validity of the proposed performance measures and the potential impacts of the application of these indicators on student diversity and graduation numbers. Higher education providers, councils of deans, employers, teachers’ associations, and teacher regulatory authorities each argued that the proposed indicators were poor measures of quality and may have perverse or unintended consequences, with providers incentivised to “game the system”. The assumption that current accreditation processes were not adequate to drive quality was also countered by several submissions. We discuss implications of this reform for implementation and policy, noting anomalies between stakeholder feedback and recommendations made in the final TEEP report.