The LANTITE is a trial that every teacher who is educated in Australia needs to conquer.
It is a literacy and numeracy test that you need to complete before you can graduate from any Australian university with a teaching degree. It is designed to prove that you as a teacher are in the top 30% of the Australian population for literacy and numeracy.
There are many reasons why the LANTITE has been implemented, but it has been difficult for many pre-service teachers. For starters, there are the emotional aspects of having their entire future careers (that they’ve already studied for) destroyed at the last minute, but many teachers also do not end up being able to cross this final hurdle.
So what if this is you? What can you do if you can’t pass the LANTITE?
- Try again.
- Invest in preparing for the tests.
- Contact ACER
- Change degrees.
Try again
You can actually sit your LANTITE a few times. You do not only get the one shot to pass it. The problem with re-taking the test is that you may not get much information about what questions you got wrong to help prepare you for next time.
You should come away with a little more information about what the test is like, though. The kinds of questions that it asks are meant to be highly relevant and specific to your work as a teacher, so getting a feel for what this means can help you prepare for next time.
You can’t keep sitting the tests forever, though. You only get three shots before you can’t try anymore and need to accept defeat. Which means that if you fail it the first time…
Invest in preparing for the tests.
There are a whole lot of resources out there to help you prepare for the LANTITE. Every university is interested in your success, as they really don’t like it when their students can’t pass their degrees. If you have a look on your university’s website or ask some of your lecturers, I’m sure that they can point you in the direction of some resources or tutoring help that you have access to.
In addition to this, the ACER website actually has a lot of information to help you prepare. There are details about exactly what each of the different types of questions means and what you can expect, as well as what the standard that you have to reach looks like.
It may also be worth getting a private tutor, depending on your needs. Regardless of what path you choose to go down, remember that you only have three shots at this and if you fail them all, you will not be able to use your degree in Australia. Those are high stakes, and you’ve probably already spent too much money on this degree to not pay that little bit more to make sure that you can actually complete it.
Contact ACER
The Australian Council for Educational Research is the organisation that organises and runs the LANTITE. They are the ones who set the test and the rules.
There have been instances where pre-service teachers have been able to contact ACER and negotiate a deal. For instance, say you are an international student doing a teaching degree in Australia and plan to move back overseas once it is completed. English is at least a second language for you, so you do not pass the literacy portion of the LANTITE within your three attempts. In this case, you may be able to contact ACER to complete your degree, but not become a registered teacher in Australia.
This is just one example, and there are many out there. Regardless, it is well worth contacting ACER to see if you can figure something out.
Change degrees.
You’ve tried your hardest, and it wasn’t enough. You pulled out all the stops and studied until you dropped and you still failed your third attempt at the LANTITE. ACER won’t help, so what do you do now?
It doesn’t mean that you need to give up on teaching. You are, of course, more than welcome to. There are plenty of jobs that you can get with a teaching skillset in tutoring or corporate training (as just two examples), but there have been cases where people have been able to become highly successful teachers without having passed the LANTITE.
One person on Reddit said that they were able to transfer their credits that they got in their teaching degree to a related degree so that they could graduate, before studying a short teaching degree in the UK. While it did take them a few more years, they were able to become a qualified teacher in the UK and ended up coming home to Australia to teach.
There is always hope!
There has been a lot of debate about how valid the LANTITE is for every teacher. Most can agree that an English teacher should be in the top 30% of the Australian population for literacy, and that aspiring Maths teachers should be able to say the same for numeracy. But what if your high school History teacher isn’t very good at Maths? Or if your Year 12 Maths teacher can’t spell very well?
While the LANTITE is a requirement for completing your teaching degree in Australia, you still walk away with all of that knowledge and skills if you don’t pass. There are reasons for the LANTITE being implemented, but there are ways that you can prove that you don’t need it to be a good teacher.
Did you fail the LANTITE? What did you do? Were there any resources that really helped you? Leave a comment down below!
