Trust the teaching profession with the responsibilities of a profession

This article highlights the importance of entrusting the profession to develop its own infrastructure for defining standards. During the last ten year nearly twenty professional associations have developed their own standards for accomplished teaching in their specialist fields and they want to use them to provide a certification system for those who meet them. The present question is whether the Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs (MCEEDYA) will enable the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) to build on this resource and allow teachers and their associations to take the major responsibility for developing and implementing a voluntary standards-based professional certification system, which will be essential to the latter's success. The author argues that it is time for the profession to be entrusted with one of the main responsibilities of a profession; that is, to establish its own infrastructure for defining standards for accomplished practice, promoting development toward those standards and providing a rigorous system for the certification of those who reach them. The author's prediction is that AITSL's success will depend, in large part, on the extent to which MCEEDYA ensures that teachers have a strong sense of ownership for its certification system and a major responsibility for ensuring its rigour and professional credibility.