A Companion to Research in Teacher Education

Chapter 11

Initial Teacher Education

in Ireland—A Case Study

Teresa O’Doherty and Judith Harford

This chapter examines how international research and the literature on good
practice in initial teacher education has been reflected and refracted within a
national policy. Influenced by the Global Education Reform Movement, control of
teacher education curriculum has shifted from the higher education institutions to
the Teaching Council and government agencies. Reflecting the turn to practice
within the literature, the role and place of school placement and partnership with
schools is now a dominant feature within ITE programmes. In parallel, influenced
by the need to achieve critical mass to support and maintain educational research,
partnership between institutions has also been mandated, resulting in further loss of
institutional autonomy for ITE providers. Within this chapter, partnership in Irish
education is reviewed from two specific aspects

1. The reconceptualised curriculum of ITE, where university-schools partnerships
   are now a mandated requirement for accreditation/recognition of programmes,
   and significant portions of ITE programmes must be school-based;


2. The revision of the infrastructure of ITE provision, where in a bid to reduce
   fragmentation, create a critical mass and thereby sustainable and research led
   and driven high quality ITE provision, traditionally autonomous institutions are
   currently engaged in a process of amalgamation, incorporation or creating
   strategic‘partnerships’and alliances.
   Ensuring high-quality initial teacher education is a key concern across the
   OECD (Schleicher 2012 ). The emphasis on and visibility of ITE on the policy
   landscape is a relatively recent development, resulting from the confluence of a

T. O’Doherty (&)
Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland
e-mail: [email protected]

J. Harford
School of Education, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
e-mail: [email protected]

©Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017
M.A. Peters et al. (eds.),A Companion to Research in Teacher Education,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4075-7_11

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