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Week 14: Understanding Australia’s teaching profession
A survey of teachers’ work helps policy makers work towards a society in which every learner experiences success and has an opportunity to achieve their potential.
Australian schooling is a patchwork of government, Catholic and independent school systems across eight states and territories, and because of that we have no single source of workforce data on the teaching profession at the national level, except through the Staff in Australia’s Schools (SiAS) survey, a large national survey first conducted by ACER under contract to the Australian Government in 2006-07. The second was in 2010.
A Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs working group has been developing a framework to obtain nationally consistent workforce data on the profession. ‘SiAS is able to contribute to that,’ says Phillip McKenzie, Research Director of the Teaching, Learning and Transitions research program at ACER and ACER’s Director of SiAS, ‘by taking a snapshot at one point in time, using common definitions and a standard methodology for reporting, as advised by a committee representing all the school systems.’
‘SiAS has more than 50 detailed questions collecting a lot of information in one hit, which we can then break down by, say, age, gender, location and specialisation, to answer questions about the likelihood of staying in the profession, for example, or professional development needs, or out-of-field teaching in a way that would be difficult to do with data from any other source.’
SiAS looks closely at teachers’ attitudes and motivations, Phillip explains, because you need to know about the likelihood of people staying in the profession as well as the age profile of the profession. ‘SiAS provides systems with the national data plus data for their system for such a purpose, and some systems ask us to undertake additional analyses for them.’
SiAS, Phillip observes, is a big effort requiring a lot of assistance from school systems and schools. ‘Schools often complain that they are over-surveyed and principals quite rightly need to be convinced about the value of any new survey before asking their staff for more work. While that makes it challenging, there is a growing recognition that SiAS is a benefit for the profession because it helps decision makers be better informed about the work and careers of staff in Australia’s schools.’
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Week 52: State of the art psychometric and statistical analysis
Week 51: Assessing civics and citizenship
Week 50: International research into teaching and learning
GOAL 1
Learners and their needs
every learner engaged in challenging learning opportunities appropriate to their readiness and needs
GOAL 2
The Learning Profession
every learning professional highly skilled, knowledgeable and engaged in excellent practice
GOAL 3
Places of learning
every learning community well resourced and passionately committed to improving outcomes for all learners
GOAL 4
A Learning Society
a society in which every learner experiences success and has an opportunity to achieve their potential
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