teaching and learning that could potentially take over leadership of teacher training
from the universities.
He leaves us in no doubt about the orchestrated attack on teacher profession-
alism and autonomy that emerged in a set of teacher training policies is best
described as“another example of the neoliberal combination of the strong state and
the free market”(p. 471). One of the results has been that some universities have
begun to abandon teacher education while others have embraced School Direct, a
scheme in which schools undertake the recruitment of trainee teachers themselves
and may then choose which universities to work with.
Drawing on the work of Furlong (2013) in the UK and Labaree (2004) in the US,
and the official criticisms of university-based teacher education, Whitty makes the
case for the importance of a professionally oriented“discipline”of Education,
although not necessarily involving a commitment to one model. Whatever the long
term outcome it certainly also looks likely that private providers will become part of
a more differentiated“market”in the not too distant future, as they already are in
some other parts of the world.
The concerns that Whitty raises have also been felt in the Nordic countries,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand and around the world, as contributors to this
section amply demonstrate.
If there is one knock-down argument to Gove’s craft-based view of teaching
mastery learned on-site in the classroom, it is that even best practice schools and
teachers today require a research and innovative approach to teaching and to an
understanding of the future world of work. As Schleicher (2012) argues,
Perhaps the most challenging dilemma for teachers today is that routine cog-
nitive skills, the skills that are easiest to teach and easiest to test, are also the skills
that are easiest to digitize, automate and outsource. A generation ago, teachers
could expect that what they taught would last for a lifetime of their students. Today,
where individuals can access content on Google, where routine cognitive skills are
being digitized or outsourced, and where jobs are changing rapidly, education
systems need to place much greater emphasis on enabling individuals to become
lifelong learners, to manage complex ways of thinking and complex ways of
working that computers cannot take over easily. Students need to be capable not
only of constantly adapting but also of constantly learning and growing, of posi-
tioning themselves and repositioning themselves in a fast changing world (p. 13).
Schleicher (2012) puts the argument on evenfirmer ground when he suggests:
The kind of teaching needed today requires teachers to be high-level knowledge
workers who constantly advance their own professional knowledge as well as that
of their profession. But people who see themselves as knowledge workers are not
attracted by schools organized like an assembly line, with teachers working as
interchangeable widgets in a bureaucratic command and control environment
(p. 13).
This is perhaps the reason that in some settings what have been called‘clinical’
models of teacher education are emerging. These are models which emphasize the
importance of learning to teach through a systematic process of enquiry that
includes the careful analysis of teaching episodes and involves considerable
102 Part II: Initial Teacher Education