Higher standards are in line with best international practice, writes Associate Prof Claire Fletcher-Flinn.
Steven Sexton, a senior lecturer at the University of Otago's College of Education, has noted (ODT, 7.2.14) New Zealand seems to be catching up with much of the rest of the world by making primary teacher training a postgraduate programme of study.
However, he seems less than enthusiastic about this important development and sees it as almost inevitable but perhaps somewhat regrettable.
This is a view shared by quite a number of New Zealand educationists.
For my part, I was pleased to hear this initiative is now almost certain to go ahead.
I believe it will deliver many benefits, both to new teachers and to the schools and their pupils where they will eventually teach.
Postgraduate initial teacher education (ITE) will ensure new teachers are more mature, more widely experienced and taught to a higher standard.
As it is, almost all primary and early childhood teacher trainees leave school and go directly into a teacher education programme.
Usually, in this, they have no contact with the wider university; instead, they proceed as a cohort through a programme taught almost exclusively by teacher-training staff, themselves mostly former teachers, and in premises that are usually a sub-campus peripheral to the mainstream university.
In this way, they have little or no exposure to wider university staff, curricula or students.
As many will have come from families of teachers, their perspectives must necessarily be narrow.
They spend three years in a bubble with no outside contact to speak of; then they proceed to teach in schools, if they are among the lucky few to secure a full-time teaching job. Most don't, at the moment.
The requirement to obtain a first degree will act as a useful external check on education departments' and colleges' admission standards, which, inevitably, will be raised, since entry into a university master's programme requires a much higher level of achievement than a bare pass.
Such an approach would ensure that a student already has a good degree with which to develop an alternative career should teaching not prove to be as attractive as they had hoped, or to switch to secondary teaching should that be their later preferred path.
As so few teaching graduates are at present able to secure permanent posts (a prerequisite for registration as a teacher) or, indeed, any teaching-related positions, it is essential this broader flexibility should be available.
I am somewhat dismayed the old systems have continued for so long, because this development has been talked about for some time; the new proposals are far, far better and are in line with best international practice and in step with the decisive actions that Michael Gove is driving in Britain.
In Britain, the United States and many other countries, ITE has long been solely postgraduate.
In New Zealand, some universities have taken steps in this direction.
In Auckland, for example, an outstanding secondary programme is being developed wherein students spend minimal time in the lecture room and much more working with outstanding mentors in exemplary schools.
The aim is to produce outstanding teachers, informed by the very best practice, in a hands-on real-world environment.
Certainly, the elimination of the old-style three to four-year Teachers College undergraduate programmes will mean a sharp reduction in student numbers and will almost inevitably have implications for the numbers and type of academic staff required, and this will need to be handled sensitively by the various institutions around the country as they make this transition.
Existing teachers, too, I imagine, will be cautious of a cohort entering the profession with much higher qualifications than theirs.
Dr Sexton and others worry that important attributes of intending teachers, such as empathy, enthusiasm and the ability to communicate, might be lost.
There is no reason why this should be so, and procedures to ensure prospective candidates possess such qualities are already well established in other professions.
Rigorous selection procedures can more than cope with this, especially as the number of candidates is likely to be dramatically less than is the case in the mass teaching training programmes in place at the moment.
Given the low demand for new teachers (although this may change with changing demographics), it seems most desirable that fewer would-be teachers be recruited and only the best, those capable of postgraduate study, be exposed to a higher-quality curriculum and hands-on best practice.
Schools, pupils and the newly trained teachers themselves will all benefit, as will the country as a whole.
When 5-year-olds can come home with their little spelling book in which their teacher has herself misspelt some of the words they must learn, it is surely time for standards to rise substantially.
For these reasons, we should all embrace postgraduate ITE and urge its immediate implementation, not heave a sigh of regret that it seems it must come.
• Dr Fletcher-Flinn teaches and researches at the University of Otago College of Education.
