Australian Teacher Education: Some background observations

It would be too optimistic to suggest that the rate of internally produced change in teacher education has been so great that it has outpaced and made redundant or irrelevant any recommendations. While there has been considerable upgrading of teacher education programs through the efforts of the academics involved and their associations (especially the Australian Council of Deans of Education and the Australian Teacher Education Association), the past two decades have also seen a substantial diminution of the resources committed to teacher education. In part this has been the result of the incorporation of teacher education into the universities and the opportunity this created for universities in difŽ cult times to strip assets from teacher education in order to support other initiatives. The creation of a ‘uniŽ ed national system’ of universities and their partial privatisation in the 1980s and 1990s, coupled with the removal of one billion dollars of Commonwealth support for universities simultaneously with an increase of student enrolments by some 400 000, has produced a remarkably tense situation in universities. Reductions in staff as a major contribution to reducing costs has been common among all universities.