Successive Australian policies including the Liberal government’s Next Steps: Report of the Quality Initial Teacher Education Review (2022) and the Labor government’s Teacher Education Expert Panel Discussion Paper (2023) have positioned midcareer Initial Teacher Education (ITE) entrants as ‘game changers’ to address teacher shortages and enhance diversity in the teaching profession. Indeed, research reveals that their status as game changers is often short lived as 25% are more likely to leave the profession within the first five years than those that enter via more traditional pathways. It is therefore timely to examine the retention of this cohort in ITE in more depth. How these so-called ‘career change teachers’ are defined, and how ITE programs cater to the needs of this unique cohort, are not fully understood. This paper brings together Stephen Ball’s policy enactment, and Margaret Archer’s theorisations on emergent properties to ascertain how 40 Australian teacher educators are responding to this policy direction. We describe how interpretive, material, and discursive lenses of policy enactment are infused with either enabling and/or constraining emergences of translation. In doing so, first we outline how teacher educators speak and think about career change teachers. Second, we analyse teacher educators’ deliberations on the personal, structural and/or cultural conditions that they weigh up to accommodate (or not) this specific group. Findings reveal that teacher educators define career change teachers in similar and divergent ways and institutions accommodate this group variously. Recommendations are made for how universities can better prepare and sustain this cohort to stay in the profession.

Australian Government. (2023). Teacher education expert panel discussion paper. Retrieved from https://www.education.gov.au/quality-initial-teacher-education-review/resources/teacher-education-expert-panel-discussion-paper Australian Government. (2022) Next Steps: Report of the Quality Initial Teacher Education review> Retrieved from https://www.education.gov.au/quality-initial-teacher-education-review/resources/next-steps-report-quality-initial-teacher-education-review