number of factors described as‘the perfect storm’(Conway and Murphy 2013 ).
Influenced by a multiplicity of external and internal factors, the reform of the
nature, content, duration and structure of teacher provision and providers in recent
years, provides an interesting case study of change in teacher education. Following
a long period of stability where the structure of teacher education had remained
unchanged for many decades, the establishment of the Teaching Council, the
statutory body with responsibility for regulating the teaching profession, in 2006,
was a significant development on the education landscape. Traditionally universi-
ties and colleges exercised high levels of institutional autonomy in relation to the
content and nature of teacher education programmes with little state intervention or
regulation. This situation has changed considerably, and teacher education has
become the object of state intervention and regulation, at a period when the gov-
ernment is seeking to recapture economic prosperity and competitiveness.
Ireland’s poor national performance in PISA, and influenced by economic
regeneration and perceptions about our international competitiveness, the
Department of Education and Skills [DES] decided to extend the duration of ITE
programmes to provide additional time for the development of teachers’skills in
teaching literacy and numeracy (DES 2011 , July). Led by the then reform-oriented
Minister for Education and Skills (Ruairí Quinn), supported by a vigorous
Department, building on the foundation established by the Teaching Council, and
facilitated by a period of austerity andfinancial rectitude, the time was ripe for the
reform of long established processes and institutions.
Working within a state where teachers and teaching are highly valued, the
Teaching Council has espoused a particular set of values and aspirations for Irish
teacher education. The reform agenda is carefully balanced between preserving the
commitment to high-quality teacher education and centralising control over the
content, and management, of ITE. Consequently, partnership, which assumes
equality and mutual respect built up voluntarily over a sustained period of time, has
taken on new shades of understandings within the Irish landscape.
11.1 School-University Partnerships and the Professional
Preparation of Student Teachers
The issue of where student teachers are most effectively prepared for the profession
is one of the‘most vigorously debated’issues throughout the history of formal
teacher education (Zeichner 2008 , p. 263). As Robinson ( 2008 , p. 385) notes,‘the
history of teacher preparation provides ample evidence of tensions between the
liberal arts and professional conceptions, between theoretical and clinical prepa-
ration, between university-based and school-based approaches’. More recently,
however, the universitisation of teacher education has emerged as a dominant trend
internationally, with teacher education being increasingly university-led, with
concomitant implications for partner schools involved in initial teacher education.
168 T. O’Doherty and J. Harford