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Every state in the US will have to publish annual rating for teacher preparation courses run in a bid to improve the quality of training, the US Department for Education has announced.

Education secretary John B. King Jnr admitted that there was “much more we can do” to better prepare new teachers for their first jobs.

In launching the new regulations today, the Department outlined a series of measures to hold teacher training institutions to account and provide them with feedback on their performance.

Key provisions include:

• Employment and retention rates of graduates in their first three years of teaching
• Feedback from graudates and their employers on the effectiveness of the programs
• The effectiveness of new teachers measured by teacher evaluations nad the performance of their students.
• Assurances that graduates of programs have correct content and pedagogical knowledge

Additionally, all teacher preparation programs will have to be rated as either effective, at-risk or low-performing. States will have to provide assistance to low-performing programs to help them improve.

Individual states will be responsible for drawing up the specifics of how they report the quality of the training courses. It is expected that they will be fully implemented in the 2018/19 academic  year.

Programs that are not rated as effective for at least two of the previous three years will lose TEACH grants.

The announcement comes the week after former education secretary Arne Duncan criticized the quality of teacher preparation programs. In an open letter last week, Mr Duncan said courses ‘rigor’ and he that programs were guilty of “grade inflation”.

The new regulations will “help ensure that new teachers are ready to succeed in the classroom and that every student is taught by a great educator”, the Department said in a statement today.

Mr King added: “Prospective teachers need good information to select the right program; school districts need access to the best trained professionals for every opening in every school; and preparation programs need feedback about their graduates’ experiences in schools to refine their programs.

“These regulations will help strengthen teacher preparation so that prospective teachers get off to the best start they can, and preparation programs can meet the needs of students and schools for great educators.”