The Australian Professional Standards for Teachers do not adequately outline what teachers should know and be able to do, and are neutral as to what constitutes effective practice. As such, they are in urgent need of reform.

These reforms should be conducted in parallel with adoption of recommendations of the Strong beginnings report of the Teacher Education Expert Panel. For example, where the core content of Strong beginnings correctly draws on robust research showing clearly that human cognitive processes are largely the same, the corresponding section of the Standards emphasises teacher differentiation and suggests that the learning needs of various groups are different.

The Standards are a foundation of current initial teacher education (ITE) coursework, as well as in accreditation/registration processes for practicing teachers at all levels, and therefore represent a cornerstone of policy regarding teaching quality.

The Strong beginnings report recommended mandating four areas of core content in ITE to align more closely with evidence of best practice. If these efforts are to be successful, standards also must be brought into line.

Consequently, this paper advocates a new set of Standards that are based on evidence. A model for policy-makers is England’s Early Career Framework (ECF) which covers similar areas to the Standards but is far more detailed. For example, the ECF’s ‘Subject and Curriculum’ emphasises teacher knowledge, sequencing in the context of schema theory and retrieval and automaticity, whereas the Australian Standard 2 discusses student engagement and declines to specify what ‘well-sequenced’ means. Where the ECF specifies systematic synthetic phonics as a requirement for reading, the Australian Standards describe ‘literacy and numeracy’ in generalities.