‘Quality’ at a cost: the politics of teacher education policy in Australia

Amid this global landscape for education and policy, this paper focuses on the subject of teacher quality through the lens of teacher education reform and one particular Australian policy initiative: The Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education (LANTITE). Introduced by the federal Australian government in 2016 as a gate-keeping mechanism for students entering teacher education, we apply a four-dimensional framework to analyse LANTITE’s role as a reform measure aimed at improving teacher education, and its impact on shaping understandings of ‘teacher quality’ and ‘quality teacher education’ in relation to the broader field.