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One of the main reasons for developing standards for beginning teachers is to bring greater clarity and focus to the outcomes expected of teacher education programs, while encouraging innovation in their delivery. Similarly, standards that seek to capture what highly accomplished teachers and school leaders know and do, aim to give clearer direction to a teacher's professional learning over the long term, while not prescribing particular styles of teaching.

The task of writing standards is a challenging one for the teaching profession and for researchers. The teaching profession in Australia has been so dominated by state government employing authorities that teachers were not accustomed to claiming for themselves the responsibility for developing profession-wide standards. But that situation has been changing in recent years. For researchers, the task of writing standards calls for them to identify the implications of their research for practice. Ideally, standards are like bridges between research and practice. They describe what current research implies teachers need to know and be able to do to provide quality opportunities for students to learn. Members of the Teaching and Leadership Program have been at the forefront of standards development work for several years.