Teacher education

The following data, sourced from the Australian Government Department of Education, shows enrolments and course completions for Initial Teacher Education.

Notes and caveats

• The data presented here is for Initial Teacher Education (ITE) courses. This refers to higher education courses coded with a special course indicator of "A course providing initial teacher training". ITE courses are a subset of the broader categorisation of all Education courses, which also includes non-ITE courses that do not lead to the option of obtaining registration as a teacher.
• The data presented include enrolments and qualifications for early childhood teachers, primary school teachers, secondary school teachers and other initial teacher education courses.
• Enrolments include all students commencing an ITE course (first-year students) and continuing students.
• Where a student undertakes more than one higher education course within a given year, the course with the highest load is published in the Department of Education’s Higher Education Statistics Collection. The enrolment data therefore only include students where their ITE course has the highest load. Where a student undertook more than one course within a given year, and the ITE course did not have the highest load, that student has not been counted.
• The data only counts each student once and does not take into account combined courses where a student was studying two ITE fields. Only the student’s main ITE field has been counted. For example, if a student was studying both primary teaching and early childhood teaching, and primary teaching was classified by the higher education institution as the main course, the student would only be counted under ‘Teacher Education: Primary’ and not ‘Teacher Education: Early Childhood’.
• Award course completions are conferred after the successful completion of all the academic requirements of a course which includes any required attendance, assignments, examinations, assessments, dissertations, practical experience and work experience in industry.
• From 2021, ITE completions include some additional fields of education. This variation is a result of changing the data collection system from the Higher Education Information Management System (HEIMS) to the Tertiary Collection of Student Information (TCSI) system.
• 'Higher Degree' includes Masters by Coursework.
• 'Other Postgraduate' includes Graduate Diploma/Postgraduate Diploma and Graduate Certificate.
• 'Bachelor' includes Bachelor Graduate Entry, Bachelor Honours and Bachelor Pass.
• 'Other Undergraduate' includes Associate Degree, Advanced Diploma, Diploma and other undergraduate award courses.
• A ‘domestic student’ is a student who is an Australian citizen, New Zealand citizen, permanent humanitarian visa holder or other permanent visa holder.
• ‘Overseas student’ refers to any student who is not a domestic student.
• Any data point with a value of less than 5 has been suppressed, and in order to maintain suppression in situations where only one data point within a total is suppressed, the next lowest data point has also been suppressed with "np" (not published).

Other sources of ITE data

• The Australian Government Department of Education's latest published ITE data can be sourced here: 2022 Section 8 Special courses - Department of Education, Australian Government
• Another source of ITE data are from the Australian Teacher Workforce Data (ATWD) initiative, published online by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). This publication uses the same underlying ITE data collected by the Department of Education, however, at the national level, the figures in the publications differ slightly due to data improvements applied by AITSL under the ATWD initiative. In particular, the ATWD initiative links the Australian Government Department of Education’s latest ITE data to other data sources to provide a more accurate estimate of teacher supply. Such linkage provides multiple benefits, including, but not limited to:
• not double counting persons undertaking a second ITE degree;
• identifying missing ITE completions; and
• increased accuracy of teacher specialisation level (Birth-5, Birth-8, Birth-12, Primary, Primary/Secondary, Secondary and Other).

 
In line with its focus on understanding supply, the ATWD initiative:

• reports state data based on state of student rather than state of provider;
• counts all persons completing ITE courses that lead to a recognised teaching qualification by omitting the courses with the Special Course: ITE flag that do not result in a teaching qualification, including, non-award, preparation, and supplementary teacher education courses.

 
It should be noted that the published ATWD data is one year behind the Department of Education's data because of the timing delay related to linking multiple data sources with different release dates. The ATWD's ITE data can be sourced here: Key metrics dashboard (aitsl.edu.au) and National Trends ITE Pipeline (aitsl.edu.au)