Ken Cliff

This paper presents a conceptual–historical analysis of a long-standing university–school partnership between the University of Wollongong and Fairy Meadow Demonstration School in New South Wales, Australia, offering a design-oriented model for embedding student voice in initial teacher education. Drawing on over 2 decades of collaborative practice, the study foregrounds the development of a third space for work-integrated learning, where pre-service teachers (PSTs) engage in culturally responsive mentoring, co-designed practice opportunities, and relational feedback loops. Student voice is represented through longitudinal anonymous subject evaluation data, which provide reflective insights into the lived experiences of PSTs within this embedded learning environment. Rather than reporting new empirical data, the paper synthesizes partnership artefacts, institutional documentation, and previously published accounts to examine how student voice is operationalised within this sustained model. Key findings highlight the sustainability of the model, its responsiveness to diverse learner needs, and its alignment with national teaching standards and global educational priorities. The paper contributes to scholarship on teacher education by offering a replicable framework for conceptualising and sustaining third space partnerships that centre student voice and pedagogical innovation.

To examine current support mechanisms for supervising teachers and tertiary supervisors in professional experience placements, we investigated the perceived effectiveness of and explored strategies for enhancing university–school collaboration through the lens of situated learning theory, operationalized via a Communities of Practice framework. Data were collected from 282 interview participants across multiple institutions. Findings reveal opportunities for enhancing support mechanism availability and effectiveness, with many supervising teachers expressing interest in additional preparation and ongoing support. University supervisors highlight opportunities to strengthen communication and resource allocation to enhance school collaboration. These findings suggest that systematic investment in community-building approaches, strengthening domain knowledge, fostering mutual engagement through collaborative professional learning, and developing shared practices through effective boundary objects, is essential to transforming fragmented supervision practices into coherent communities of practice that enhance professional experience quality and university–school partnerships.

High-quality Professional Experience (PEx) placements are central to the preparation of ‘classroom ready’ graduate teachers in Australia. However, there are frequent suggestions from the Australian Government that PEx is not as effective as it could be. Perennial PEx concerns raised in government reviews include: the need for strong partnerships between higher education providers and schools; the quality of ITE candidates and their suitability to teach; the ongoing shortage of high-quality placements and mentors; placement diversity and timing; student placement poverty; and the need to address workforce shortages. Against this backdrop we sought to systematically examine 60 stakeholder submissions to Reform Area 3 of the Australian Government’s 2023 Teacher Education Expert Panel Discussion Paper, which recommended new PEx guidelines, system-level partnership agreements, Centres of Excellence, and student support to ‘improve the quality of practical experience in teaching’. Using content analysis software Leximancer, we mapped themes and perspectives in the responses of seven stakeholder groups, each with distinct motivations and expertise: higher education providers, regulatory bodies, Councils of Deans, employers, teachers’ associations, advocates and individuals. An eighth group, ‘other’ represented three stakeholders that did not fit existing categories. Three overarching meta-themes were identified: (i) provision of funding and resources, (ii) creation of high-quality placements, and (iii) the necessity (or not) of new partnership agreements. While stakeholders noted broad support for the recommendations of the Discussion Paper, a diversity of perspectives was evident in their discussion of resources and preference for ‘centralised’ agreements to support consistent and widespread delivery of high-quality PEx.

Performance indicators and other accountability measures are increasingly common in higher education internationally. Consistent with this trend, the Australian Federal Government’s Teacher Education Expert Panel (TEEP) recently recommended new reforms to strengthen the link between performance and funding of initial teacher education (ITE). Recommended reforms included (i) the measurement and publication of ITE performance on four categories of indicators, including student selection, student retention, graduate readiness, and the employment outcomes of recent graduates and early career teachers, and (ii) the use of transition, excellence, or compact-based funding as levers for driving quality. While the proposal for the adoption of performance indicators to measure the quality of ITE has since been accepted by Australian Education ministers, our inductive content analysis of 56 public submissions in response to the proposed reforms revealed a divergence of views on the validity of the proposed performance measures and the potential impacts of these indicators on student diversity and graduation numbers. Higher education providers, Deans of Education, employers, teachers’ associations, and teacher regulatory authorities were consistent in arguing that the proposed indicators were not direct measures of quality and may have perverse or unintended consequences, with providers incentivised to ‘game the system’. Some stakeholders also queried assumptions that current accreditation processes are not sufficient to drive quality. We discuss implications of this reform for implementation and policy, noting important anomalies between stakeholder feedback and recommendations made in the final TEEP report.

For children with low self-regulation in the preschool years, the likelihood of poorer intellectual, health, wealth and anti-social outcomes in adulthood is overwhelming. Yet this knowledge has not yielded a framework for understanding self-regulatory change, nor generated particularly successful methods for enacting this change. Reconciling insights from cross-disciplinary theory, research and practice, this study seeks to implement a newly developed program of low-cost and routine practices and activities for supporting early self-regulatory development within preschool contexts and to evaluate its effect on children’s self-regulation, executive function and school readiness; and educator perceived knowledge, attitudes and self-efficacy related to self-regulation. The Early Start to Self-Regulation study is a cluster randomized, controlled trial for evaluating benefits of the Preschool Situational Self-Regulation Toolkit (PRSIST) program, when implemented by early childhood educators, compared with routine practice. The PRSIST program combines professional learning, adult practices, child activities and connections to the home to support children’s self-regulation development. Fifty preschool centers in New South Wales, Australia, will be selected to ensure a range of characteristics, namely: National Quality Standards (NQS) ratings, geographic location and socioeconomic status. After collection of baseline child and educator data, participating centers will then be randomly allocated to one of two groups, stratified by NQS rating: (1) an intervention group (25 centers) that will implement the PRSIST program; or (2) a control group (25 centers) that will continue to engage in practice as usual. Primary outcomes at the child level will be two measures of self-regulation: Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task and the PRSIST observational assessment. Secondary outcomes at the child level will be adult-reported measures of child self-regulation, executive function and school readiness. Outcomes at the educator level will involve a survey of their perceived knowledge, attitudes and self-efficacy for supporting children’s self-regulatory development. In all cases, data collectors will be blinded to group allocation. This is the first randomized controlled trial of a new program to foster early self-regulation, using low-cost practices and activities that are aligned with early-years contexts, routines and practices. Results will provide important information about the efficacy of this approach and evaluate its underlying model of self-regulatory change. Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry, ACTRN12617001568303 . Registered on 21 November 2017.