AITSL counts supervised teaching practice in days, your university almost certainly recorded it in weeks or hours, and AITSL publishes no conversion between them

AITSL’s supervised teaching practice requirement is a count of days. Every occupation checklist uses the same unit, and the number is the same in all seven:

“completion of at least 45 days of supervised teaching practice with students across the 5 to 12 years age range in a primary school setting” — Primary School Teacher checklist, July 2026

Almost no university outside Australia records a practicum in days. Transcripts record weeks, contact hours, credit points, or “one term”. AITSL does not publish a conversion between any of those and its days, and we looked: not in the checklists, not in the July 2026 application guide, not on the supervised teaching practice page. There is no definition of how many hours make a day, no weeks-to-days table, and no statement that a partial day counts or does not.

What AITSL does instead is push the arithmetic onto your university. The evidence it requires is a statement that must “state the duration of the STP completed”, and the university writes that number. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why this requirement fails applications that ought to pass.

This page states what AITSL publishes. It does not predict how AITSL will assess anything, and AITSL is explicit that it will not pre-check: it does not provide a pre-assessment service.

What counts, in AITSL’s definition

The definition is narrow and every clause in it excludes something:

“Supervised teaching practice (STP) is the compulsory component of an initial teacher education (ITE) qualification during which time a student teacher is on a school placement and engaged in the teaching and learning process with school students. This teaching practice is under the supervision of a qualified teacher and university education staff and is formally assessed. University-based teaching practice activities undertaken with fellow students and university staff will not be considered.”

Five conditions: it must be a compulsory component of the ITE qualification; it must be on a school placement; it must involve school students; it must be supervised by both a qualified teacher and university education staff; and it must be formally assessed. Microteaching and peer-taught university sessions are ruled out by the last sentence.

The exclusion that removes the most people is a separate FAQ:

“Does work experience count towards meeting the STP requirements? No. Work experience undertaken before or after the completion of an initial teacher education qualification is not counted as STP. Only STP undertaken with school students in a school setting, as a compulsory component of an initial teacher education qualification, will be considered in the skills assessment.”

Before or after. Years of full-time classroom teaching do not fill a practicum shortfall, and neither does a paid teaching post held while studying if it was not the compulsory assessed placement.

The days are the same everywhere; the setting and the ages are not

We opened all seven occupation checklists. Each requires at least 45 days. What differs is where those days must be spent and with whom:

Occupation (ANZSCO)	Age range required	Setting required
Primary School Teacher (241213)	5 to 12 years	primary school setting
Middle School Teacher (241311)	10 to 15 years	middle school setting, or split (below)
Secondary School Teacher (241411)	13 to 18 years	secondary school setting
Special Needs Teacher (241511)	not specified	“a school setting”; special needs setting if the specialist study is inside the ITE qualification
Teacher of the Hearing Impaired (241512)	not specified	“a school setting”; with hearing impaired students if the specialist study is inside the ITE qualification
Teacher of the Sight Impaired (241513)	not specified	“a school setting”; with sight impaired students if the specialist study is inside the ITE qualification
Special Education Teacher, nec (241599)	not specified	“a school setting”; special education setting if the specialist study is inside the ITE qualification

Two structural points come out of that table.

The specialist occupations move the condition rather than adding one. For the four special-education occupations, the checklist requires a year of specialist study in addition to the ITE year, and then attaches a conditional: “If this study is a component of the initial teacher education qualification then the supervised teaching practice must be completed in a special needs setting” (wording varies by occupation). So whether your placement setting is constrained depends on whether your specialist study sat inside your teaching qualification or beside it. That is an unusual rule and it is easy to read past.

Middle school is the only occupation with a split requirement. Its checklist adds a sentence the others do not have:

“Supervised teaching practice may be completed in a separate middle school or by teaching students in both upper primary and lower secondary schools, with a minimum of 10 days teaching upper primary aged students (10–12 years) and a minimum of 10 days teaching lower secondary school aged students (13–15 years).”

For anyone from a system that has no middle school, that is the only published route: a documented split across two phases, with a floor on each side. It is also the only place in the whole set where AITSL publishes a sub-count.

The one place AITSL is generous, and it is worth knowing about

The age ranges look intimidating until you read the FAQ:

“Does STP need to be completed with every age specified for an occupation? No. The minimum 45 days duration of STP must be undertaken within the specified age range in the relevant school setting, but it does not need to be completed with every age in that range. For example, if you are applying for a skills assessment for secondary teacher occupation and the STP requirement specifies an age range of 13 to 18 years, completing your STP with students aged 15 to 17 years would be considered as meeting the requirement.”

So the range is a boundary, not a checklist. Placement entirely with Years 10 and 11 satisfies a 13-to-18 requirement. Placement that strays outside the range does not count toward that occupation — which is the same rule read the other way, and is what makes the choice of nominated occupation consequential.

The evidence rule is stricter than the count

This is where the requirement is really decided, because AITSL will only accept one kind of document.

“We require an official statement from the university awarding the ITE qualification as evidence of STP. The official statement must:

• be on official university letterhead
• be signed and dated by a university representative
• state the duration of the STP completed
• state the age range of the students taught, and
• state the school setting in which the practice was completed.”

Five elements. A statement missing any one of them does not do the job — most commonly the age range, which universities rarely think to record, and the setting, which they often describe by school name rather than by type.

And the list of what is refused, which is the more useful half:

“What is not accepted?

• Statements from affiliated colleges, schools or training providers
• STP reports (i.e., placement reports signed by the supervising teacher)
• Qualified Teacher Status, Induction or Teacher Registration certificates
• Work experience statements or reports.”

Each of those is a document a real applicant genuinely holds and reasonably believes is proof.

The first line is the one that ends applications from partnership and franchise arrangements: the statement must come from the university awarding the qualification, not from the college where you actually studied or the school where you were placed. If your degree was delivered by an affiliated institution, the letter has to come from the awarding body anyway.

The second line is counterintuitive enough to be worth restating. Your placement report — the document written by the teacher who watched you teach, describing what you taught and for how long — is explicitly not accepted. The person who observed you is not the person AITSL will hear from.

AITSL’s UK guidance shows the failure mode this creates. Among the reasons a qualification may not meet the criterion, it lists “A PGCE where the awarding institution is not able to provide the required evidence for supervised teaching practice.” Not a PGCE without a practicum — a PGCE whose institution cannot document one. The requirement is as much about your university’s record-keeping as about your education.

So how do you get to a number of days?

Honestly: AITSL does not tell you, and we are not going to invent a conversion.

What the published documents establish is this. The unit is days. The number is at least 45. The evidence is a university statement that must “state the duration of the STP completed”. AITSL nowhere defines a day, nowhere converts hours or weeks, and nowhere says whether half-days aggregate. It follows that the duration figure AITSL assesses is whatever your awarding university certifies it to be — which means the practical task is not calculating your own equivalent but getting the university to express the placement in a way that answers AITSL’s question.

If your university’s records are in weeks or hours, that is a conversation to have with the registry before you apply, not after an outcome. If they will only certify what their records literally say, that is worth knowing early too, because AITSL will not accept a substitute document from you or from the school.

If you have already applied and the shortfall is real rather than documentary, note what AITSL says about new evidence: an appeal considers “the original application and additional information/evidence demonstrating you met the assessment criteria at the time of your initial assessment”, and anything obtained after the outcome date “will need to be submitted” as “a brand-new assessment application”. A formal appeal must be requested by email “within 60 days of the date of your assessment outcome”.

What to do with this

1. Find out how your placement is recorded in your university’s own system — days, weeks, hours or credit points — before you request anything.
2. Ask the awarding university, not the delivering college and not the placement school, for a statement on letterhead, signed and dated, containing all five required elements. Send them the five bullets.
3. Check the age range you were actually placed with against the occupation you intend to nominate, and pick the occupation to match the placement rather than the other way round. The occupation checklists differ only in this respect.
4. If you trained in a system with no middle phase and want to nominate Middle School Teacher, look for the two-sided split and check both floors are documented separately.
5. If your specialist study sat inside your teaching qualification, check whether that pulls a setting condition onto your placement.
6. Do not send placement reports, QTS certificates or employment letters as substitutes. AITSL names all three as not accepted, and its FAQ says extra documents slow the assessment down.

How the practicum fits into the wider qualification criterion is set out in AITSL’s qualification criterion.

This site summarises published rules. It is not AITSL, it does not assess qualifications, and nothing here is a prediction of an outcome — AITSL decides, on a complete application, against the criteria in force when you apply. For anything about visas, go to the Department of Home Affairs or a registered migration agent.