Early career teachers in Australia: a critical policy historiography

Abstract

Amid the growing ‘teacher quality’ discourse, early career teachers have increasingly been positioned as problematic in Australian education policy discourses over the past decade. This paper uses a critical policy historiography approach to compare representations of early career teachers in two key education policy documents, from the late 1990s and mid-2010s. Starting with the Government response to A Class Act: Inquiry into the Status of the Teaching Profession (1998) and moving to the Government response to Action Now: Classroom Ready Teachers (2015), it explores changing representations in the context of broader shifts in education policy related to teachers’ work over this timeframe. It argues that the early career teacher ‘problem’ is articulated in very different ways in these two timeframes, explores the antecedents of key tenets of the current policy settlement, and, using the theory of practice architectures, considers the implications of these for the preconditions that shape and frame teachers’ work in contemporary times.

Keywords:

• Critical analysis
• politics teachers’ work’

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their close reading and highly constructive feedback, and also to acknowledge Bob Lingard, Meghan Stacey, Debra Talbot, Matthew AM Thomas, and Sydney School of Education & Social Work Writing Group Members Christine Preston and Marianne Fenech for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. The Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR) is the score used to determine admission to higher education courses in Australia.