The Australian national exceptional teaching for disadvantaged schools programme: a reflection on its first 8 years

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the aims, origins and principles of the Australian National Exceptional Teaching for Disadvantaged Schools programme and reflects on findings from its first eight years. As a well-established, mainstream university-based initial teacher-education programme designed to prepare social justice teachers for low socio-economic or high-poverty schools, NETDS has had significant impact on recruiting and retaining high-performing teachers in the schools that need them most. In this paper we discuss how it works, but also outline some of the complexities that arose in trying to design a teacher-education programme with equity at the centre and some of the changes we made along the way.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• high-poverty schools
• disadvantage
• innovation
• social justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.