TEACHERS don't need to be smart or gifted as long as they are passionate, federal School Education Minister Peter Garrett says.

Mr Garrett was responding today to plans by the NSW government to consider ways of lifting professional standards and make it easier to fire underperforming teachers.

He said he didn't think the teaching profession needed to be more selective.

"It is not necessarily a fact that someone who is academically smart makes a better teacher than someone who isn't,'' Mr Garrett told reporters in Canberra.

"I don't think education should necessarily be the province of the particularly smart or gifted.''

Mr Garrett said he knew teachers who weren't the most academically gifted but nevertheless went on to be great because they had passion and enthusiasm for the kids they taught.

NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli said university entrance scores for people studying teaching were sometimes too low.

Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) scores range from less than 50 to the high 90s, Mr Piccoli told reporters in Sydney today, adding that "below 50 is not the kind of score that we want for schoolteachers''.

Mr Piccoli has suggested schools limit training places as a way of combating the national oversupply of new teachers due partly to the federal government's decision to deregulate university places.

A NSW discussion paper released today also proposes minimum standards for teaching degrees, including a requirement that students study mathematics, science or a foreign language at secondary school.

But Mr Garrett insists that federal and state education ministers have already agreed to minimum standards for teacher training.

"They ought to ensure, over time, that the teachers that are going into the classrooms will do the job to the best of their ability for their students,'' he said, adding that it was important that training institutions provided instruction "across the range of skills that are necessary for teachers''.