Dr Melissa Barnes is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, working within the fields of teacher education, assessment, policy and TESOL. She is a critic of the controversial initial teacher education test, also known as the LANTITE.

To begin with, Barnes highlighted the problem with attaching the word "quality" to the those who pass the LANTITE test or "quality" teachers in general. As she explains, quality is a diverse and difficult-to-explain phenomenon that varies in different educational contexts. The academic does not believe "a literacy and numeracy test is the best way to measure teacher quality in the country".

Barnes also argues that a third-party organisation such as the Australian Council for Education Research (ACER) is not the best way to assess students' literacy and numeracy skills, and such a test would be best left up to the universities to administer.

Finally, the Monash lecturer in education holds concerns about the standardised nature of the test, meaning students are completing a multiple-choice test essentially. Barnes recently conducted a study with roughly 134-fourth year education students and found that many of them had concerns about the validity of the test.

While Barnes believes strong numeracy and literacy skills are critical to teaching, she is unconvinced LANTITE has much to offer in assessing the skills we want to see in teachers.

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