Like many countries, teacher education in Australia is a highly scrutinized domain. Since the 1970s there have been more than 100 reviews of teacher education, and in 2014 yet another review was announced with the report still to be delivered early in 2015. The focus of this most recent review – on pedagogy, subject content and professional experience – highlights the current policy foci for teacher education in Australia. Teacher education policy is often positioned as a mechanism for achieving ends determined elsewhere according to urgent political agendas (Bates, 2005) In this way, teacher education is positioned as a ‘policy problem’. 'When teacher education is defined as a policy problem, the goal is to determine which of the broad parameters that can be controlled by policy-makers (e.g. teacher testing, subject matter requirements, alternate entry pathways) is most likely to enhance teacher quality' (Cochran-Smith, 2008, p.273). This is the current situation in Australia with various ‘national solutions’ being promulgated via federal policies.

Grossman (2008) has suggested that ‘as researchers and practitioners in the field of teacher education, we seem ill prepared to respond to critics who question the value of professional education for teachers with evidence of our effectiveness’ (p.13). Recently, the Australian Government Productivity Commission highlighted the need for an evidence base to inform an evaluation of the delivery of initial teacher education and which also tracks the subsequent performance of teachers (Productivity Commission, 2012, p.119). However, high quality, larger-scale research into teacher education and its effectiveness is lacking. Reviews of teacher education research in Australia have concluded that it is characterised by isolated small-scale investigations (e.g.Murray, Nuttall, & Mitchell, 2008). The findings from these isolated small-scale studies do not produce the convergent findings policy makers are seeking; indeed they never set out to do so. In this absence, attention turns to the quality of the entrants into teacher education and control of the content of the teacher education curriculum as proxies for ensuring quality teachers for the profession. This is reflected in the current Australian context with frenzied media and political attention to entry standards for initial teacher education entrants and tighter regulation through standards while at the same time moves to bypass initial teacher education as it has been traditionally designed and offered.

This proposal draws on a project designed to provide an evidence base in relation to the effectiveness of teacher education in Australia. ‘Studying the Effectiveness of Teacher Education’ (SETE) has been a four-year longitudinal study (2011-2014) funded by the Australian Research Council. It followed 2010 and 2011 teacher education graduates in two Australian states, Queensland and Victoria, to investigate their perceptions of the effectiveness of their teacher education programs for their current teaching positions, and their career pathways. In addition, it investigated their principals’ perceptions of the graduate teachers’ effectiveness.

The project addressed the following research questions:

• How well equipped are teacher education graduates to meet the requirements of the diverse settings in which they are employed?
• What characteristics of teacher education programs are most effective in preparing teachers to work in a variety of school settings?
• How does the teacher education course attended impact on graduate employment destination, pathways and retention within the profession?

This proposed paper interrogates findings which highlight the centrality of a transitional phase of learning to teach - transition from preservice teacher education to early career teaching, and how the way in which early career teachers think about their teacher preparation and their effectiveness as beginning teaching is mediated in complex ways by a range of conditions of work as experienced by these teachers.

Bates, R. (2005). An anarchy of cultures: the politics of teacher education in new times. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 33(3), 231-241. doi: 10.1080/13598660500298056 British Educational Research Association (BERA). (2014). Research and the Teaching Profession: Building the capacity for a self-improving education system. Final Report of the BERA-RSA Inquiry into the Role of Research in Teacher Education. London: BERA. Cochran-Smith, M. (2008). The new teacher education in the United States: Directions forward. Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, 14(4), 271-282. Creswell, J. W. (2003). Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Green, B. (2009). Understanding and Researching Professional Practice. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Grossman, P. (2008). Responding to our critics: From crisis to opprtunity in research on teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 59(1), 10-23. Murray, S., Nuttall, J., & Mitchell, J. (2008). Research into initial teacher education in Australia: a survey of the literature 1995-2004. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24(1), 225-239. Productivity Commission. (2012). Schools Workforce, Research Report. Canberra.