Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

Over the last couple of years we have taken a range of actions to improve the quality of teaching for initial teacher education and training in our universities, to ensure minimum standards of those exiting university in terms of their personal literacy and numeracy skills. We are driving the states to make sure that in future primary school teachers undertake subject specialisations so that we can have more specialist maths or science teachers or other specialist teachers in our primary schools in the future complementing the hard work of other teachers throughout the schooling system. We have applied and are working to deliver more than a dozen initiatives outlined in our Quality Schools, Quality Outcomes plan, which we released at the time of the budget earlier this year, including: further emphasis on specialisation; ensuring that students must complete, if they are going onto university, a maths or science subject; setting minimum literacy and numeracy standards for year 12 students; and raising the benchmark of ambition in our schools so that we know that will have an impact right through the years of schooling, to increase the focus on maths and science, as is essential to succeed. (Time expired)