Impact

Teach For Australia seeks to ensure that students taught by Associates emerge from classrooms on a path to expanded opportunities and that partner schools increase their capacity to support all their students.

Associates facilitate rapid growth in student outcomes and help students to experience increased access to opportunity by expanding their horizons and encouraging them to pursue never-before-considered pathways to ensure that they have real choices for their futures.

In addition to their work with their individual classes, Associates are focused on school-wide improvements. They take initiative throughout their school communities in a number of ways including joining school improvement teams, leading extracurricular activities, mentoring other teachers, organising study tours and starting subject study clubs.

As such, 100 per cent of principals surveyed this year indicated that they have benefited from the Teach For Australia program, with Maisie Floyd, Principal of Tennant Creek High School, Northern Territory, stating,

“There has been a significant difference to student learning due to the determination and passion that the Associates bring to the classroom and the school.”

Last year, Teach For Australia received funding from the Eureka Benevolent Foundation to support the design and implementation of the Impact Measurement Project (IMP), devised to improve the way that teacher effectiveness is understood and measured.

Through the IMP, we are moving beyond tracking program outputs such as Associate characteristics, leadership positions and program retention to measuring program outcomes such as student academic results, wellbeing, aspirations and broader school impact. The support from Eureka Benevolent Foundation has ensured that this important project could be implemented.

Teach For Australia is creating a pipeline of highly effective teachers and leaders for communities of high need. Leadership is already strongly emerging,  with over 50 per cent of Alumni in school leadership positions in 2017. Additionally, 94 per cent of Associates complete the Leadership Development Program and 86 per cent of Cohort 2015 Alumni remain in teaching for a third year.

Almost 80 per cent of Alumni are currently working in the education sector, with 65 per cent teaching. Our Alumni are beginning to make their mark as government and political leaders and social entrepreneurs, including Alumna Sonia Loudon (Cohort 2013) who founded Boundless. Teach For Australia fosters Alumni leadership to drive reform and innovation in education beyond the classroom.

Additionally, we are supporting systemic improvements in school leadership and policy.

In 2015, we launched EdFelllows in partnership with the Foundation for Young Australians and Learning First. As Australia’s first teacher policy fellowship, EdFellows develops the policy and advocacy skills of early-career teachers. In order to close the education gap, we believe that the work of teachers should be at the heart of education policy reform. The first cohort of fellows completed the program late this year.