Did teaching and learning quality end up on the cutting room floor of the University Accord? Did it even make it to the table?

Emeritus Professor Denise Chalmers AM

Writing a vision document to guide governments and institutions on future directions, funding and structure for higher education is a daunting task and so the Universities Accord Panel, headed by Professor O’Kane, is to be commended for taking on the big review agenda and producing a wide-ranging Final Report.

Professor Mary O’Kane said at the recent Universities Australia conference in February that much of what was submitted and considered by the Panel could not be included in the Final Report and ended up ‘on the cutting room floor’.  I was left wondering if much of what was left out included deliberations on ways in which the quality of learning and teaching could be systemically improved, because very little was included in the Accord Report itself. 

In the little on teaching and learning quality that was included, the Accord commented that raising the quality and status of teaching will be important and recommended that “professional [teaching] standards be developed for Australian higher education, modelled on the framework administered by AdvanceHE in the United Kingdom (see Recommendation 31)”.

The Accord Panel seems to have been unaware that, in 2013, the Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) funded a number of grants to develop Australian Professional Teaching Standards. These projects involved extensive consultation across Australian institutions with the Australian Tertiary Teacher Standards Framework (2015) and Teaching Quality Indicators (2017) developed and benchmarked internationally. In the years following, these indicators were elaborated upon and embedded into the majority of university teaching standards, as exampled in these case studies. Other national initiatives have built on this OLT work, including the Taxonomy for Credentialing Australasian University Educators (2022) and the Universities Australia Statement of Principles for Professional Development and Recognition of Educators (2019). While funding of the OLT was cancelled in 2016 by the Commonwealth Government, the Learning and Teaching Repository holds these reports and legacy documents, all freely available via open access. It would be a great shame if this home-grown work, already undertaken and referenced to the Australian sector and inclusive of Indigenous knowledges and perspectives, was ignored in favour of a framework and system administered by the UK based AdvanceHE.

The Accord recommended the creation of a Learning and Teaching Council within the proposed mega Australian Tertiary Education Commission (Recommendation 30 h. iii.). Such a Council would “take up and expand the role of the former OLT” (p 180). It would be a travesty if this new body ignored the significant work that has already been undertaken.

A further comment in the Accord was that teachers in higher education “should be encouraged to gain an accredited teaching qualification”, and that “over time it should become the norm that higher education teaching staff hold a teaching qualification” (p 177). The issue of teaching qualifications for higher education teachers has been raised nationally for more than 20 years and has also consistently been left on the cutting room floor. Accord Recommendation 31 (mentioned above) positioned these matters, together with the adoption of Teaching Standards, as aspects of “Improving workforce capability and capacity”. In fact, only one Accord recommendation (Recommendation 21 out of 47 recommendations) directly addressed the development and delivery of “Quality learning and teaching”, with no commentary on funding and priority.

I have been in the sector long enough to recall the “Higher Education at the Crossroads” (2002) and the “Our Universities: Backing Australia’s Future” (2003) papers produced under the then Minster of Education, Brendan Nelson. These were government generated papers, and so came with a clear vision, funding and strategy to achieve their goals. Re-reading them now, I am struck by the similarities of their intent with the Universities Accord on the importance of expanding the opportunity for higher education study to a broader and diverse student population (as was also called for in the 2008 Bradley Review). In advance of the 2012 Behrendt Review, the Backing Australia’s Future paper particularly included strategies and initiatives for supporting First Nations students. Backing Australia’s Future resulted in significant changes in higher education teaching and learning, research and community and industry engagement specifically because it was backed up by clear strategies and funding. While there may be some differences of opinion about the success of all of these initiatives, they did have a positive impact on the quality of teaching across the university sector.

The Commonwealth Government would be well advised to review these prior initiatives and consider their relevance for how it might respond to the recommendations of the University Accord. Whatever is decided, it must be the case that that the quality and status of learning and teaching gets more than the cursory attention it received in the Accord. It is laudable that the Accord envisages significant growth in the number of students engaged in higher education by some hundreds of thousands but, if those students are to succeed, the quality of teaching and learning, and particularly the quality of the teachers themselves, must be directly addressed.

If higher education qualifications are argued to be critical in driving “national economic and social development and environmental sustainability” (Recommendation 1) then those who teach in higher education must be appropriately qualified and supported by the institutions that employ them. This will not be achieved “over time” as suggested in the Accord. For more than 20 years universities have actively resisted any requirements for their academics to be qualified in one of their key roles as teachers, since first proposed in the 2002 Crossroads discussion papers. It is ironic that the institutions that award qualifications for teaching to not see the value in ensuring their own teachers are suitably qualified to teach. Unless universities are compelled to act, we will see the same issues raised in the next version of the Accord. More importantly, we will have not provided the high quality of teaching and learning that our students need and deserve.

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Emeritus Professor Denise Chalmers AM is the 2023 Australian Awards for University Teaching Career Achievement Award recipient.