Every year around university offer time, the same moral panic rolls in on cue: students with “low ATARs” are being offered places in teaching degrees. This year’s headlines about 2025 offers have followed the same tired script — breathless, alarmist, and light on facts.
Let’s start with what the ATAR actually is — and what it isn’t.
ATAR is not a measure of intelligence, character or teaching potential. It is a ranking of Year 12 results against a cohort, shaped by subject choice, scaling, school resources and life circumstances. At its core, it is an administrative sorting tool — a way of rationing scarce university places by deciding who gets into which course at which university. That is why the ATAR cut-off for Law at Sydney University sits around 99.50, while Law at UNE is closer to 86.00: it reflects demand and competition for places, not the inherent “quality” of students. Even in a class full of ‘brilliant’ students, ranking still means some are labelled “higher” and others “lower” — but everyone in that room is still ‘brilliant’, capable and talented. Treating ATAR as a neat proxy for “quality” ignores both how the system works and how uneven the playing field is.
Then there’s the way headlines frame offers to students with lower ATARs.
Yes, some students with ATARs under 50 have been offered places in teaching degrees in 2025. That is true. But what’s misleading is the implication that these offers mean standards have collapsed or that people are being waved into classrooms on the basis of a single number. University entry is no longer a single gate labelled ATAR. Offers reflect adjustment factors, alternative entry pathways, bridging programs and targeted equity schemes.
Those same headlines also quietly assume that students learn nothing across four years of university study — that someone who starts a degree with a low ATAR somehow finishes it with the same skills, knowledge and capability. That’s nonsense. Teaching degrees require students to pass literacy and numeracy tests, complete professional experience placements, and meet accreditation standards to progress and graduate. Entry is only the first filter. Capability is tested repeatedly before anyone is allowed into a classroom.
But the bigger problem is that these stories ask the wrong question.
The real issue is not why some students with lower ATARs are choosing teaching.
The real issue is why so many students with high ATARs are not choosing teaching.
High-achieving students are making rational choices. They look at teaching and see unsustainable workloads, endless compliance, rising behavioural complexity with shrinking specialist support, public blame for systemic problems, and starting salaries that lag behind professions with comparable responsibility.
This is where it matters to be fair: the NSW Labor Government has not ignored these pressures. It has actively moved to reduce teacher shortages, convert temporary contracts to permanent roles, improve conditions in hard-to-staff schools, bring cleaners back into government employ to improve school environments, and invest in wellbeing and behaviour supports. Teacher vacancies are down, permanency is up, and workforce stability is improving. None of this fixes everything overnight — but it shows that policy settings and political will do make a difference.
In that context, the task is not to tear down teaching as a career, but to keep rebuilding its attractiveness — especially to high-achieving students who want meaningful, respected work that doesn’t come at the cost of burnout.
There’s also something quietly insulting about the way these debates frame “low ATAR” students. They assume that only one narrow academic profile produces good teachers. Anyone who has worked in schools knows that great teachers bring far more than exam scores: communication skills, cultural understanding, empathy, classroom presence, and the grit to keep showing up when the work is hard. Some of the strongest teachers in our schools did not arrive with headline ATARs — but they grew into exceptional practitioners because the profession gave them the chance.
If we are serious about teacher quality, the conversation needs to move beyond cheap ATAR panic and towards making teaching a profession that high-achieving students actively choose — because it is respected, supported and sustainable.
Low ATARs are not the crisis.
The crisis has been a long-term erosion of the status and conditions of teaching — and that is exactly what current reforms are beginning to repair.
Denise McHugh is an experienced educator in Tamworth. She is Chair of the NSW ALP Education and Skills Committee and Deputy President of the Independent Education Union (IEU).
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