Regulatory rigour of teacher education has a price, set out in the PhillipsKPA report on profession accreditation. One university states accrediting a big course can cost $100k and regional universities complain about the long-existing problem of classroom placements. And institutions with on-line teacher education courses complain that accreditors are “operating with a cultural construct of on-campus, face-to-face delivery of lectures, tutorials and workshops to students who live within a close proximity to the campus.”

And then there are the states; “anecdotal evidence suggests that a significant difficulty facing providers is the tendency for individual state and territory regulatory authorities to add further requirements to the national standards and procedures adding more layers to information requirements or to take more restrictive interpretations than might have been intended. Multiple layers of regulation and multiple jurisdictions for many providers add to the cost and administrative burden,” PhillipsKPA reports.

But the minister does not sound especially sympathetic. “When we came to government in 2013 one of the key priorities we identified was the need to improve teacher quality and better prepare new teachers for the classroom. … A key element of this is the development of a national set of standards and procedures for the accreditation of initial teacher education programs, which was endorsed by all state and territory education ministers,” Simon Birmingham says.