The plan involves senior educators and researchers travelling between campuses to teach, as well as meeting with practising teachers in the community.

Video-conference classes will increasingly be replaced with online classes and at least one subject will be run in intensive mode in two-week blocks.

Staff numbers in La Trobe’s School of Education will reduce from 54 to 50, with a further two to become fixed-term.

Senior university officials presented the plan to staff in Bendigo on Tuesday.

La Trobe University pro-vice chancellor Simon Evans said the changes had been prompted by several factors, including recommendations from the Gonski 2.0 report for classroom teaching to be tailored to individual students rather than entire classes.

He said enrolments had been declining due to the increase in minimum ATAR, the end of the Diploma of Education and an overall decline across the sector.

“The fundamental purpose of doing this is to refresh and update the programs and to get more leading educators into the classroom training the teachers of tomorrow,” Professor Evans said.

“They will be delivered through an integrated School of Education with strong cross-fertilisation between all of the campuses, the Bendigo and Bundoora campuses as the largest, and the smaller regional campuses.

“And making sure that we get the school leaders – leading researchers and educators – on each of those campuses engaging with the students, but also engaging with the local schools.”

He said students would have greater access to academics, who will spend more time speaking with practising teachers and carrying out local research projects.

La Trobe University staff have two weeks to review the proposal and to provide feedback.

Pro-vice chancellor Richard Speed said video conferencing was not a preferred method of teaching.

“What we do at the moment is we do quite a bit of teaching through video conference, where somebody has stood in a room 200 kilometres away and you attempt to keep up through video conference,” he said.

“That is not a great way to teach. So we want to move a lot of that into online, which allows you to download when you want and then you have interactions back with a local teacher.”

Professor Evans said La Trobe University would support a review of the minimum ATAR requirement to enter Teacher Education.

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