‘Quality and consequence’: interrogating the drive for new performance indicators and funding levers in Australian initial teacher education programs

Performance indicators and other accountability measures are increasingly common in higher education internationally. Consistent with this trend, the Australian Federal Government’s Teacher Education Expert Panel (TEEP) recently recommended new reforms to strengthen the link between performance and funding of initial teacher education (ITE). Recommended reforms included (i) the measurement and publication of ITE performance on four categories of indicators, including student selection, student retention, graduate readiness, and the employment outcomes of recent graduates and early career teachers, and (ii) the use of transition, excellence, or compact-based funding as levers for driving quality. While the proposal for the adoption of performance indicators to measure the quality of ITE has since been accepted by Australian Education ministers, our inductive content analysis of 56 public submissions in response to the proposed reforms revealed a divergence of views on the validity of the proposed performance measures and the potential impacts of these indicators on student diversity and graduation numbers. Higher education providers, Deans of Education, employers, teachers’ associations, and teacher regulatory authorities were consistent in arguing that the proposed indicators were not direct measures of quality and may have perverse or unintended consequences, with providers incentivised to ‘game the system’. Some stakeholders also queried assumptions that current accreditation processes are not sufficient to drive quality. We discuss implications of this reform for implementation and policy, noting important anomalies between stakeholder feedback and recommendations made in the final TEEP report.