Teacher Education in Times of Change

Beauchamp, Gary, Clarke, Linda, Gary Beauchamp, Linda Clarke, Moira Hulme, Martin Jephcote, Aileen Kennedy, Geraldine Magennis, Ian Menter, Jean Murray, Trevor Mutton, Teresa O'Doherty, Gillian Peiser

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781447318576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungspolitik

Why is teacher education policy significant - politically, sociologically and educationally? While the importance of practice in teacher education has long been recognised, the significance of policy has only been fully appreciated more recently. Teacher education in times of change offers a critical examination of teacher education policy in the UK and Ireland over the past three decades, since the first intervention of government in the curriculum. Written by a research group from five countries, it makes international comparisons, and covers broader developments in professional learning, to place these key issues and lessons in a wider context.

Part One:
Setting the scene:
context and methods

---

ONE

Introduction

Ian Menter

Why is teacher education policy significant — politically, sociologically and educationally? While the significance of practice in teacher education has long been recognised, influencing as it does the practice of teachers in schools and colleges and thereby having a strong effect on the quality of educational experiences for learners, the significance of policy in teacher education has only been fully appreciated in the more recent past.

It is our contention, in writing this book, that an analysis of teacher education policy in any state system is deeply revealing of the currently dominant values within that society. Through defining how and where teachers should be prepared for their work and sometimes through prescribing exactly what it is they should know and be able to do, we see how those in power in society are seeking to shape the world for future citizens. However, these values and commitments are not necessarily simply enacted within society. There may well be considerable resistances, adaptations and ‘accommodations’ that are made as policy processes are played out. Indeed, our further line of argument is that these contestations themselves are highly significant sociologically and are frequently indicative of deep underlying conflicts within society. It is for reasons such as this that the study of teacher education policy is of enormous interest, not only to educationalists but also to sociologists and political scientists.

Teacher education became a particular focus for political intervention in the United Kingdom (UK), the Republic of Ireland (RoI) and across the developed world during the 1980s, which was a time of enormous political and cultural change. Under the influence of neoliberal governments, cultures of accountability and control developed rapidly, leading to the emergence of teacher education systems dominated by standards frameworks, which set out explicitly what it was that teachers should be able to do and setting conditions for the provision of teacher education. There was also heightened contestation about the location of teacher education. What were the respective contributions of colleges, universities, schools, local authorities and central government, for example? And what were the governance arrangements, including the responsibilities of local and central government, teaching councils and other bodies?

This book draws predominantly on the experience of the contributors of working in and researching teacher education in the four jurisdictions of the UK and the RoI over many years. However, the perspectives taken are not inward looking and at all times we seek to relate developments in the UK and RoI to developments in Europe, North America and Australasia in particular, but also to the changing global dynamics of education more generally. Nevertheless, the insights to be gained from ‘home international’ investigation (Raffe et al, 1999) within what some have described as a ‘natural experimental laboratory’ are extremely rich. The methodological issues that arise from such a comparative approach are explored in considerably more detail in Chapter Three.

Later in this introduction, following exploration of some of the main themes of the book, the rationale for and the creation of the Teacher Education Group, its support by a number of educational organisations and its links with international networks will be explained. The chapter concludes by setting out the structure of the book.

The significance of policy in teacher education

The historic origins of teacher education systems around the world are closely associated with the emergence of the provision of public schooling. Details of the arrangements for public schooling vary enormously internationally and there is also considerable variation in the details of the provision of teacher education. Nevertheless, a number of themes have been consistently at the centre of developments in most parts of the world, including:

• the respective contributions of educational theory, educational research and practical experience;
• the respective contributions of serving teachers, other professional educators and educationalists (theorists and researchers);
• the best sites for learning for beginning teachers — the school, the educational laboratory, the college or the university.

Although these developments can be traced back well into the 19th century, one key starting point for this book is the 1980s. In particular, a key text published in 1984, with the title Change in teacher education (Alexander et al, 1984a), captures the dynamic upheavals and transformations that were starting to occur during that period (see Chapter Four for a fuller discussion). And although that book focused mainly on England and Wales, there were resonances of similar changes elsewhere in the UK and beyond.

The 1980s was the decade in which the full ‘economisation’ of state education started to take hold, as neoliberal Thatcherite policies across all of the public services were being developed. (Equivalent approaches under ‘Reaganomics’ in the United States [US] were soon to follow.) This was an era of the ‘marketisation’ of educational provision, with ideas about the use of vouchers for the procurement of schooling being floated by right-wing think tanks and ‘parental choice’ in schooling being promoted. Education increasingly came to be seen as a consumer good that should be subject to ‘the logic of the market place’ (Ball, 2003, p 8).

As will become clear later in this volume, the trajectory of such neoliberal thinking was far from consistently developed across the UK and RoI, with the RoI and Scotland each taking rather different approaches to ‘reform’ of both schooling and teacher education. Indeed, there was considerable resistance to neoliberal policies in Scotland and, although the Westminster-based UK government at that time had full legal authority over Scottish education, because it was administered separately through the Scottish Office, the policy community in Scotland was able to resist the policies with considerable success (Paterson, 2003). In the RoI, policy was much more influenced by developments in Europe than by those in the UK.

Furthermore, again as we shall see later, following the changed arrangements for intra-UK governance that followed from the election of a ‘New Labour’ government at Westminster in 1997, we saw full responsibility for education policy being devolved to new political institutions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This led to even more distinctive trajectories than had previously been the case, with increased divergence in some key aspects of education policy (Jones, 2003; Menter et al, 2006).

But before looking at the impact of these changes post-1984 and post-1997, we should first give greater consideration to the arrangements for teacher education that had developed across the UK and RoI during the 19th and 20th centuries. The histories of teacher education have been written elsewhere (eg Cruickshank, 1970; Dent, 1977; Coolahan, 2004a) but could be summarised as follows.

The preparation of teachers for younger children had tended to be distinct from that of older children and indeed it was the development of elementary schooling that had originally led to the development of institutionalised approaches to teacher preparation. This was initially through strongly apprenticeship-based approaches, such as pupil— teacher schemes and then ‘normal schools’, leading eventually to the establishment of teacher training colleges or colleges of education, most of which specialised in provision for early years and primary school-aged children. The 20th century saw the steady extension of the duration of compulsory schooling — the recurrent raising of the school leaving age. This led from a time when many teachers in secondary schools were employed without a teaching qualification — usually basing their expertise on a university degree in the subject that they taught — through to a situation where a number of universities created departments of education (sometimes based on day training colleges), which could offer teaching certificates.

By the 1970s, teaching was moving towards becoming an all-graduate profession, which led to the rapid expansion of colleges of education and university departments, with many of the degrees awarded by colleges being validated by universities.

The development of education studies as a major area of academic work was associated with this expansion, with new specialist fields — sometimes known as the ‘disciplines of education’(history, philosophy, psychology and sociology) — emerging (Furlong, 2013a). So it was that across the UK and RoI, by the 1980s it was common for all teachers to have a teaching qualification, either a degree such as the Bachelor of Education (BEd) (taken over three or four years) or a Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE), usually a one-year programme of study following a three-year (or in Scotland a four-year) first degree.

The 1980s was a period of economic recession following the sudden rise in oil prices during the mid-1970s. There were enormous pressures on public spending and this was one of the key factors that led to the ‘rationalisation’ of teacher education provision in the UK, with the closure and/or amalgamation of many colleges of education (Hencke, 1978). Furthermore, many of these independent ‘monotechnics’ became part of multidisciplinary polytechnics or colleges of advanced technology, so bringing teacher education increasingly into the wider provision of higher education. During the 1990s, a further significant step was taken when the ‘binary line’ between vocational and non-vocational higher education institutions was abolished. A process began whereby almost all of the higher education institutions in the UK would become universities — or sometimes university colleges (as for example was the case for two colleges in Northern Ireland).

This, then, was the backdrop against which direct political interest in the processes of teacher education began to take a grip — especially in England and Wales. Indeed, we tend to draw examples in what follows especially from the English context because these examples provide the clearest exemplification of the trends that are being described. Some of the examples are then discussed again, albeit in more detail, in Chapter Four, which focuses directly on England.

Political intervention in teacher education in the UK and RoI

The paradoxes inherent in neoliberal intervention in education policies have been well explored by scholars such as Ball (1994), Tomlinson (2001), Chitty (2014) and others. As Whitty and Menter (1989) put it, in an early analysis of the impact of the Education Reform Act 1988 in England and Wales, these policies demonstrate a curious combination of the moral authoritarianism demonstrated in the imposition of a prescribed curriculum and new systems of testing, on the one hand, and the economic libertarianism of new modes of governance, on the other, including such policies at that time as ‘open enrolment into schools’ and the ‘local management of schools’ (LMS).

The ideology of parental choice as the ‘driver’ of educational improvement could only be justified if parents (consumers) had access to information upon which to come to a decision about which school to send their child to. In this move to what LeGrand and others called ‘quasi-marketisation’ (LeGrand and Bartlett, 1993; LeGrand, 2007), we saw increased competitiveness between schools and new accountability measures, not least the development of school ‘league tables’ and the publication of school inspection outcomes under the auspices of Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education), which replaced inspections by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate in 1992.

If much of the rationale for this marketisation was provided by public concern about educational standards (sometimes seen as a media-driven ‘moral panic’) and about the alleged informality and progressive ideologies that were influencing teaching in many schools, then it is perhaps not surprising that attention should very soon pass to teachers and to their education and training. In England, the first very clear policy intervention in this respect came through a government White Paper entitled Teaching quality (DES, 1983), which was produced while Sir Keith (later Lord) Joseph was the-then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Education. Joseph was a key neoliberal thinker in the Conservative government, strongly influenced by neoliberal economists Friedman and von Hayek and himself strongly influencing Thatcher’s economic policy. The White Paper explicitly expressed concern about the quality of teaching in England and Wales and drew attention to the wide range of practices in teacher preparation. Emerging from this White Paper the following year was the first national body to introduce national regulations into the provision of teacher education — the Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (CATE). These regulations were set out in a government circular (known as ‘3/84’) entitled Initial teacher training (DES, 1984) and included stipulations about the balance between student teachers’ study of subject matter — including the requirement of a specialist subject — and their examination of ‘educational and professional studies’. They also set out a minimum amount of time to be spent in a school setting in each initial teacher education programme. Furthermore, on the basis that many ‘education lecturers’ in colleges and universities were deemed to be out of touch with current practices in schools, a requirement was introduced that such staff should have regular periods of ‘renewal of professional experience’.

It is important to point out that much of the thinking behind these proposals and their successors — there was a succession of similar circulars that continued well into the 1990s — had been influenced by a succession of pamphlets and media stories generated by right-wing think tanks, including the Adam Smith Institute, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Hillgate Group (see Furlong et al, 2000; Chapter Three, this volume). The allegations in these publications were that teacher training colleges had been dominated by members of ‘the loony left’ who were preaching anti-racism, anti-sexism or even ‘class warfare’ to student teachers and were inculcating them with ‘barmy educational theory’. These pamphleteers and their colleagues took the alternative view that good teaching was a simple matter of love for a subject and an ability to communicate that subject in a classroom. Indeed, when Kenneth Clarke succeeded as Secretary of State for Education in the early 1990s, his main platform in this area was to argue that new teachers would learn best from working alongside existing teachers (even though those teachers themselves had been subject to the alleged biased approaches of the colleges of education!). He therefore called for three quarters of the PGCE training year to be based in schools. By the time this was implemented, the proportion was reduced to two thirds, a proportion that in essence prevails in England to this day.

Thus began a process of increasingly centralised control of initial teacher education in England that was only partially mirrored elsewhere in the UK, or indeed in the RoI and Europe. The 1980s was a period of considerable tension for teachers, with a number of disputes about pay and conditions as well as them being increasingly subjected — especially then in the 1990s — to a ‘discourse of derision’ (Ball, 1990), with the teaching profession being portrayed as a significant part of ‘the problem’ of education. When the New Labour government was elected at Westminster in 1997, one of its first education publications was a Green Paper entitled Teachers: Meeting the challenge of change (DfEE, 1988; see also Graham, 1999). This in itself did not propose many changes in initial teacher education (other than the introduction of ‘skills tests’ for beginning teachers); however, it did signal the introduction of ‘performance management’ into teaching and the introduction of new performance-related payments, with the establishment of a pay threshold. In order to progress over the threshold, teachers had to be assessed against a series of standards.

Indeed, ‘competences’and then ‘standards’had been introduced just a few months earlier into initial teacher education through circular 9/97 (DfEE, 1997) — a New Labour document that set out ‘observable behaviours’that beginning teachers would have to demonstrate before they could qualify. In due course, the government also introduced a national curriculum for initial teacher training and subsequently very prescriptive measures about the teaching of literacy, including the requirement to teach a particular approach to learning to read — ‘systematic synthetic phonics’.

This tendency for prescription in the organisation and management of teacher education — as with the twin approaches of neoliberalism noted above in relation to schools — was complemented by a process of ‘diversification’ of entry routes into teaching. It is worthy of note, however, that such diversification has not occurred in Scotland and is far less prevalent in Wales. Northern Ireland has maintained its commitment to university-based partnerships, while in the RoI a distance learning provider — Hibernia — has been very active in offering ‘alternative’ provision. In England, though, since 1988, when employment-based routes were first introduced, there has been an increasing range of entry routes. Following the increasing emphasis on ‘school-based training’, England has seen the introduction of:

• school-centred initial teacher training (SCITT) schemes;
• Teach First — an employment-based route for ‘bright’ graduates who might not otherwise enter the teaching profession (based on Teach for America in the US);
• a range of other employment-based routes.

The most recent innovation of this kind is the introduction of ‘School Direct’ under the former coalition government. Michael Gove, who was Secretary of State for Education for the first four years of the coalition government (2010—14), published a White Paper in 2010 entitled The importance of teaching (DfE, 2010), a title used apparently without irony, in which he called for more teacher education to be school-led, rather than university-led. There were various contradictory statements from the government about the role of universities in the provision of teacher education but Gove did make it explicit in the White Paper that his aim was that half of all provision should be school-led by the time of the ensuing General Election in 2015 (see Childs and Menter, 2013).

During the same period that the Westminster government was promoting school-led teacher education, the Scottish Government was implementing the recommendations of the 2010 Donaldson Report, entitled Teaching Scotland’s future (Donaldson, 2011), which called for a consolidation of the contribution of universities to teacher education, with greater emphasis on university-based subject knowledge. Indeed, Donaldson apparently understood the nature of teaching in a manner that was in direct contrast to the way in which Gove understood it. Gove talked of a craft to be learned through an apprenticeship model, whereas Donaldson talked of a complex and intellectual profession to be learned over the course of a teacher’s career and to be informed by a high level of research and scholarship (Hulme and Menter, 2011).

More details on all of these developments are provided in subsequent chapters. The key point for consideration here though is how it can be that policy developments have taken such different directions in two distinct parts of the UK. What is it that is driving these different policy trajectories? Is it politics, prejudice, culture or ideology — or a combination of these? Or is it the careful use of research evidence or comparative international analysis — or a combination of these? There is no doubt that across the UK, the RoI and the wider world, teacher education has become deeply politicised. It is a matter that is widely commented on in the media and by politicians. The influence of international and transnational reports and surveys about t...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of authors
• List of abbreviations
• Foreword by Marilyn Cochran-Smith
• Part One: Setting the scene: context and methods
• Part Two: Teacher education policy in the five nations
• Part Three: Critical issues in teacher education policy: home international analyses
• Part Four: Conclusion
• References