This has meant that the States and Territories have had responsibility for curriculum,
assessment, reporting to parents, university entrance, and teacher education and
teacher registration. However, as Lingard and Sellar ( 2013 ) indicate, since the 1970s
there has been a growing federal involvement in education, and whilst the 1980s saw
the creation of thefirst national education policy, which related to the education of
girls (AEC 1987 ), it was also the decade when human capital theory began to drive
future national reforms. Major reforms through to the current day have been con-
cerned with ensuring that Australia can compete economically with countries
globally, but especially in the region, and that the country is ready for the‘Asian
Century’. These concerns have been reflected in, for example, the instigation of a
national curriculum,first raised in the 1980s but pursued most vigorously from 2007
onwards, and a national approach to the accreditation of pre-service teacher edu-
cation programmes. However, the complexities of State-Commonwealth relations,
and differing and changing political parties holding government across the
Commonwealth, State and Territory jurisdictions over this period, has meant that
such reforms are neither seamless nor uniform (see, for example, Lingard and
McGregor 2014 ). However, where there has been bi-partisan support and uniform
implementation has been the introduction of national literacy and numeracy testing
and the making‘transparent’of the results on these tests, along with various other
accountability measures. In regards to these trends, the former Commonwealth
Labor government introduced a website, MySchool, to enable parents to compareall
registered schools in Australia on a range of measures, but importantly, on national
literacy and numeracy tests, and also to see how schools compared with‘like
schools’. This has clearly had an impact on individual schools (see Hardy and Boyle
2011 , for discussion). However, the national tests have also led to systemic reforms
in individual States and Territories. For example, in Queensland, after that State
appeared to perform poorly against other States on the literacy and numeracy tests,
the State Labor government commissioned an inquiry into how these scores could be
improved (Masters 2009 ) and then introduced an audit of teaching and learning
practices in all government schools to improve practice (see Mills et al. 2014 ). Many
of these current, and other, educational reforms in Australia, as in many other
countries of the global North, constitute what Shalberg ( 2011 ) has referred to as the
Global Education Reform Movement, with the apt acronym GERM.
Within this GERM, there has been a focus on accountabilities, often of a very
narrow form, a valorisation of the market, an emphasis on outcomes on national and
international tests, especially as they compare to other jurisdictions. Within the
Australian strain of the GERM, teacher education has come under the spotlight as
failing to ensure that education systems across the country, and the teachers within
them, are producing students who are capable of competing with the highest per-
formers on the world stage. Underpinning many of the claims about the failings of
teacher education (and teachers in general) is the assumption that teachers makethe
difference in relation to student academic outcomes: in many instances, politicians
and the media, and many within the policy space, have used the work of Hattie
( 2012 ) to confirm this. Whilst we want to acknowledge the important work done by
teachers, and indeed by those who educate them, such an assumption washes out
43 The Place of Research in Teacher Education?... 639