Balancing intervention and agency

This chapter focuses on key national reform agendas and recent policy decisions since 2011 – when the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership initially developed requirements for Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in Australian universities. Universities providing ITE are required not only to comply with national policy, but also with the additional policies of the governments within the states or territories where the universities are located. Australia has a complex arrangement of responsibilities for aspects of school education between its national and state governments, with the Commonwealth in recent years increasingly intervening in what had traditionally been a policy area largely for the states. Strategies for attracting ‘higher-quality’ graduates into the profession which were discussed in the literature at that time – and occasionally advocated for – included salary considerations, teacher education scholarships and performance incentives in the profession itself. The chapter outlines the chronology of the national reforms to give a sense of the snowballing of regulation and compliance