AITSL will not accept PTE from migrant teachers even though Home Affairs does

An Indian teacher can satisfy the Department of Home Affairs that her English is good enough for a skilled visa by sitting the Pearson Test of English. She can do it at a centre in Hyderabad, get her result in about two days, and lodge her application.

Then she reaches the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, which assesses whether her qualification is comparable to an Australian teaching degree, and finds this on its website, with the capital letters in the original:

“No. AITSL will only accept an Academic IELTS Test Report Form. We do NOT accept PTE, PEAT, ISLPR, TOEFL, Cambridge or any other form of English language test.”

So she sits IELTS as well. And she has to hit band 8 in both speaking and listening, on a single report form, within three years.

Home Affairs accepts nine English tests. AITSL accepts one.

The requirement in full

The scores are set out in AITSL’s occupation checklists, and the wording is identical for primary and secondary teachers.

An applicant needs an Academic IELTS Test Report Form showing at least 7.0 for both reading and writing, and at least 8.0 for both speaking and listening. The scores must appear on a single test report form, and must come from a test sat in the three years before the application.

Band 8 in speaking is a high bar. It sits one band below the top of the scale, and it is the same standard the state regulators apply, so on the score itself AITSL is not an outlier. Where it stands apart is on everything around the score.

One exception is worth knowing about, because it is not widely understood and it can save an applicant a full re-sit. AITSL accepts the IELTS One Skill Retake, which allows a candidate to re-sit a single component and receive an updated report form. So a candidate who reaches band 8 in speaking but slips to 7.5 in listening can re-sit listening alone. What AITSL does not accept is scores combined across two ordinary sittings, and it does not accept IELTS Online or the IELTS Indicator test.

There is a second route that avoids testing altogether. An applicant who has completed at least four full years of higher education study in Australia, Canada, the Republic of Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom or the United States, resulting in a qualification comparable to an Australian bachelor degree or higher, does not need to sit IELTS. The study must include a recognised initial teacher education qualification, and every component of it, including supervised teaching practice, must have been completed in one or more of those six countries.

India is not among the six. Neither is Singapore, South Africa, or any other country where teaching degrees are delivered in English.

What the state regulators do instead

This is where the story becomes something other than a complaint about a hard test.

Neither the NSW Education Standards Authority nor the Victorian Institute of Teaching accepts PTE either. On that point AITSL is not alone, and any article claiming otherwise would be wrong. Both state bodies require the same band scores. But both are materially more flexible in three ways that decide real cases.

They accept a second test. NESA and VIT both accept the International Second Language Proficiency Ratings assessment as an alternative to IELTS. AITSL does not accept ISLPR, and names it among the tests it explicitly refuses.

They allow scores to be combined. NESA’s published position is that if you sit either test more than once, you can submit your combined results as long as each is at or above the required score. The Victorian Institute of Teaching’s English Language Competency Policy, effective 28 October 2025, says results “can be completed over multiple test sittings of the same test, provided that none of the results are older than three years at the time of application for registration”.

They allow exemptions. NESA grants exemption to applicants meeting two of five criteria, which include three years teaching in English, three years of professional work in English, all secondary schooling in an eligible country, teacher registration in an eligible country, or further study at Australian Qualifications Framework level 5 or above in an eligible country. The Victorian policy permits the chief executive to grant an exemption in exceptional circumstances. AITSL offers no exemption pathway at all.

There is a further oddity. The Victorian policy describes its criteria as nationally consistent and approved by the Minister. Yet the national body applies the strictest version of them.

The one thing that has moved is the visa

On 7 August 2025 the Department of Home Affairs expanded the tests it accepts for visa purposes. Its list now runs to nine: IELTS Academic, IELTS General Training, PTE Academic, TOEFL iBT, Cambridge C1 Advanced, CELPIP General, LANGUAGECERT Academic, the Michigan English Test and the Occupational English Test.

AITSL’s position has not moved at all. The institute’s July 2023 guidance carries the same sentence, word for word, that appears on its site today, including the same capitalised NOT, the same acceptance of the One Skill Retake, the same exclusion of Online and Indicator, and the same six-country four-year study alternative.

So in the three years since, the immigration department broadened its list and the teaching regulator did not.

One caution for readers who search this themselves. A migration agent blog headlined a claim that AITSL now accepts score stacking. On checking, it refers to the One Skill Retake, it dates from August 2023, and it is not a policy change.

The direction nobody has heard about

Buried in AITSL’s Annual Report 2024-25 is a ministerial direction dated 4 November 2024. It required the institute to do two things involving India specifically.

The first was to work with the Australian Government Department of Education to assess the alignment of India’s teacher education standards against Australia’s own accreditation standards and procedures for initial teacher education programs.

The second was to engage with India’s National Council for Teacher Education, to build understanding of the Australian standards and to identify ways Australia could support teacher education reforms in India.

The report confirms the work began, recording that the institute contributed to the Australian Government’s efforts in India and commenced a collaborative project with the Department of Education assessing the alignment between India’s and Australia’s teacher education standards.

The workforce these rules are filtering

Dr Sun Yee Yip, a lecturer in teacher education at Monash University, set out the scale of the problem in The Conversation on 20 April 2026.

Her figures are that migrant teachers make up about 6 per cent of the overall teaching workforce in Australia, and that there are an estimated 20,590 qualified migrant teachers who are not working in schools at all or who are underemployed. On the barriers, she wrote that they “may also need to meet English language proficiency requirements, even when they have taught for years in English-speaking settings”, and that “some describe years of waiting, repeated applications and being told they lack ‘local experience'”.

Her sharpest line is about how these teachers are received: “Yet they are often treated as newcomers with deficits rather than professionals with valuable expertise.”

She also records that others “report being overlooked because of their accent, unfamiliar names or assumptions about classroom fit”, which is a different barrier from the regulatory one and worth keeping separate from it.

One point of accuracy. Dr Yip does not name PTE anywhere in that article, and her prose refers only to the national teaching institute, though her links point to AITSL. Her subject is underutilisation rather than the specifics of test acceptance. Her figures and her framing are quoted here on their own terms.

Her 6 per cent figure traces to AITSL’s own Australian Teacher Workforce Data, which reports that approximately 6 per cent of the 2023 teacher workforce were born overseas and held initial teacher education qualifications from overseas, and that 73 per cent of migrant teachers are women. The 20,590 figure comes from the Settlement Services International campaign modelling published in August 2025, and should be attributed to that campaign rather than to an official statistical agency.

What the assessments themselves show

AITSL’s own performance data completes the picture, and it is not flattering.

The institute recorded what it called an unprecedented 44 per cent increase in skills assessment applications between October 2024 and March 2025. In 2024-25 it issued 5,778 suitable outcomes from 6,001 completed applications, a success rate of 96.3 per cent, with suitable outcomes up 26 per cent on the previous year.

Against that demand, only 53 per cent of outcomes were delivered within six weeks, against a target of 90 per cent. The annual report marks the measure “Not achieved”. The year before, the figure was 96 per cent. The institute’s Corporate Plan 2026-30 relaxes the target from six weeks to eight.

The demand context is not in doubt. The Australian Education Union reported in 2024 that almost 83 per cent of 953 schools surveyed had teacher shortages. AITSL’s workforce data records that 39 per cent of teachers intend to leave the profession before retirement and a further 35 per cent are unsure.

What a teacher reading this should do

Sit Academic IELTS, not PTE, if AITSL assessment is anywhere in your plan, and sit it before you spend money on anything else. Aim for band 8 in speaking and listening and 7 in reading and writing on one report form.

If you miss by one component, ask about the One Skill Retake rather than booking a full re-sit. It is accepted, and it is cheaper.

Understand that AITSL assessment is not the last hurdle. It establishes that your qualification is comparable. You still need registration from the regulator in the state where you intend to teach, which is NESA in New South Wales and the Victorian Institute of Teaching in Victoria, each with its own application, its own fee and its own English rules. Those state rules are more forgiving than AITSL’s, which means a teacher who cannot satisfy the national body on a single report form may still satisfy the state one on combined results, and would then be registered but without the skills assessment a visa application needs.

That is the shape of the barrier. It is not the score. It is that one body in the chain will accept only one test, only on one piece of paper, with no exemption, while the department that issues the visa accepts nine.