Part II
Initial Teacher Education
Introduction
Waterman (2015) reports on a conference lecture with Geoff Whitty, the former
Director of the Institute of Education in London and now a research professor
across universities at Bath, New York and Newcastle, Australia. He begins with the
contrast that Whitty makes between Andreas Schleicher, of the OECD and Michael
Gove, the former English Secretary for Education. Schleicher is quoted as saying:
Many of the [most successful] countries studied have moved from a system in
which teachers are recruited into a larger number of specialized, low-status colleges
of teacher education, with relatively low entrance standards, into a relatively
smaller number of university-based teacher education colleges with relatively high
entrance standards and relatively high status in the university.
This remark is then contrasted with Gove’s view:
Teaching is a craft and it is best learnt as an apprentice observing a master
craftsman—or woman. Watching others and being rigorously observed yourself as
you develop is the best route to acquiring mastery in the classroom.
These two views have dominated the policy landscape and demonstrate the ways
in which teacher education, and especially initial teacher education, have become
politicized since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s. Whitty is reported as
addressing the way in which the education establishment in UK has been singled
out for criticism by New Right pressure groups that also feed into the ensuing
policy changes designed to weaken the influence of the left or social democratic
teacher educators in universities responsible for the training of teachers. Whitty
(2014) addresses“modes of teacher education”in England in an earlier paper where
he distinguishes three main routes: Partnerships led by higher education institutions
(HEIs); School-centred initial teacher training schemes (SCITTs), and;
Employment-based routes (EBITTs). Remarking on the Coalition’s reforms, Whitty
(2014: 468) remarks
The Coalition Government’s White Paper 2010 on The Importance of Teaching
encouraged more school-led initial teacher training in England, including the cre-
ation of around 500 Teaching Schools, schools rated by Ofsted as outstanding in