Dilemmas in teacher education: sharing our English policy context with European colleagues

New ITT accreditation

The TEPE 2022 conference theme is ‘Enhancing the value of teacher education research: Implications for policy and practice’. This is particularly relevant for us.

Like all providers of teacher training in England we are subject to the DfE (Department for Education) ITT (initial teacher training) review and accreditation process. The ITT team at Leeds Beckett University (led by Dr Pinky Jain) have submitted their accreditation application and it is now under review. We await the outcome.

It seems likely that universities will remain in the list of providers of teacher training. Without universities there would probably be a sharp decline in the capacity of the system to train sufficient teachers. However, there is no way of predicting the outcomes for individual universities (or other ITT providers). Indeed on 12 April the TES ran a news item which indicated that the DfE would be paying £650-a-day to new advisers to ensure a 'smooth market exit' for ITT providers. So, some of us are going to be turfed out of ITT, but the DfE will let us down smoothly!

Dissonance between demands and expectations

Alongside the regime of Ofsted inspections of ITT, this latest accreditation policy turn acts as another regulatory factor, demanding degrees of convergence and compliance in teacher training provision.

These policy acts reify the ITT Core Content framework into curriculum and assessment documentation, teaching schedules and outcome monitoring processes. They frame ITT partnerships between universities and schools into specific forms of configuration and can be said to risk downplaying the expertise and local intelligence brought into teacher training by the teacher educators themselves.

In the same TES article it is stated that the DfE intends that ‘The new 'market quality associates' will also support successful ITT providers to provide new 'high-quality design, content and delivery'.  This certainly smacks of a small coterie of people close to the DfE who will be strong-arming the rest of us into ensuring ITT provision meets tight DfE-determined criteria. 

In universities the dissonance between the demands to produce high quality research and the requirements to meet the DfE defined expectations, thus continues to sharpen. Not least because the first demands greater criticality and collaboration with more diverse networks than the second. With the best will in the world workloads and funding constraints (including the loss of opportunity to engage as full partners in EU funded projects) it also risks a pipeline problem in research expertise in teacher education.

Research in teacher education

So, it is from this context that we are joining the TEPE conference.  Our contribution is via a symposium session related to the role of research in teacher education.  We are framing our presentation through the lens of dilemmas. 

There are three key areas of concern:

• The dilemma inherent in teacher education policy and the contested role of research in framing. Here we will draw out the tensions illustrated by comparing the conclusions of BERA-RSA enquiry (2013) on the role of research for the teaching profession and the current DfE ITT curriculum framing. The insistence on the term 'teacher training' in England rather than 'teacher education', which is commonly used internationally, is illustrative of this tension.
• The dilemma we face as teacher educators of the need to create, understand and use research evidence with professional and academic integrity to inform the ways that we understand and support diverse trainee teachers to work in diverse educational settings. Here we will draw upon an understanding of how teachers engage with research, of the variations in how student teachers conceptualise learning to teach and an Erasmus+ PROMISE project which explored the role of dilemmas in professional learning.
• The practical dilemma of undertaking our work as teacher educators (not just teacher trainers) in this contested policy context. We identify as activist scholars which we think is demanded of us by being research informed and situationally aware, but we know that this is seen as a political challenge in a culture of compliance.    

Learning from international collaboration

As we join the TEPE conference with the theme ‘Enhancing the value of teacher education research: Implications for policy and practice’ we recognise that dilemmas in teacher education are often framed as practice vs research, or the development of research-informed practice (our own and our students’) but this is only part of a complex ecology of teacher education. As teacher educators we seek the best outcomes for our student teachers (and those further into their careers) and we recognise how important it is that they meet the needs of their own current and prospective learners. To help us continue to meet this challenge we seek to engage in dialogue with stakeholders and build networks of influence, and we actively learn from our collaborations nationally and internationally. 

Our dilemmas as teacher educators are replicated across the system. We are concerned that the DfE is framing teacher training on the assumption of that the sufficiency of a relatively simplistic, singular understanding of the challenges that teachers face, regardless of who and where they are and that their teacher preparation ought to be a foundation for a long and successful career. We advocate for research-informed teacher preparation, that recognises that education policy is not neutral and needs to be critiqued. We aim to support for new and serving teachers by creating opportunities for them to learn which acknowledge that classrooms are complex, unique and multi-faceted. We feel that the DfE is naïve in its apparent assertion that we can automatically predict the challenges that will be faced by the teachers (at all career stages) brought by the societal (including economic) change or the specific characteristics of the current and future cohorts of children in our schools and colleges.  As teacher educators we therefore argue that the purpose of teacher education is to prepare student teachers to face future challenges – and thus enable them to continue to respond to these across the course of their careers. 

We will use the chance to engage with an international network of teacher educators and researchers at TEPE to have our assumptions challenged, to be met with curiosity and take time to build our more nuanced understanding to support us in our work.