research in and on education, gradually led to an increasing role for higher edu-
cation institutions in teacher education. Although this took many different forms in
different settings, from specialist teacher education‘monotechnics’, especially
where the preparation of teachers for younger ages was concerned, through to
provision within university departments of education (‘UDEs’), especially for the
preparation of subject specialists in the secondary school sector, preparation for
teaching moved towards being a professional qualification associated with an
academic qualification (see Furlong 2013, for a very through account of these
developments in the UK). In the UK, by the late 1970s, entry into teaching was
entirely through graduate routes—either a postgraduate qualification or a first
degree—typically a BEd (Alexander et al. 1984).
However, this enhanced role for higher education was increasingly contested by
people such as those alluded to earlier, who saw such an approach as overelaborate
and (sometimes) expensive. In countries around the world, but most notably in
England and in some parts of the USA, it was suggested that the place for teachers
to learn how to teach was‘on the job’, that is from other teachers—and that
school-based teacher education or training was likely to be more effective.
Proponents of this approach have not been able to offer any evidence that teachers
prepared in this way are better prepared than those coming through a route that
involves Higher education as well as school experience. However, proponents of
the HE Partnership approaches have also found it difficult to sustain their case that
this is a superior approach—hence the establishment in the UK of an inquiry into
the relationship of research and teacher education (BERA-RSA 2014). The report
from this inquiry does offer evidence that research and the contribution of Higher
Education are key components of high-quality teacher education.
The other major trend in the recent development of institutionalised teacher
education has been the introduction of‘standards’, as a benchmark against which to
judge teacher performance. Sometimes originally framed as teaching ‘compe-
tences’, statements about the knowledge, skills and dispositions (sometimes values)
that beginning teachers are required to demonstrate have swept the world of teacher
education with manifestations of some sort in the majority of nations around the
world. The specifics of these standards do vary in some regards—even within the
UK for example (see Kennedy 2016)—but they are all based on a view that if
teaching quality is a matter of such importance, then it is crucial to have some
explicit criteria by which to judge readiness for teaching. One effect of this‘stan-
dardisation’could be seen to be to reduce the autonomy of the actual provider of
teacher education in making decisions about the aims and content of specific
courses, but such has been the consensual view of the national significance of
teaching that the universities and other providers have not resisted this incursion
into their academic freedom to any great extent (see Ellis and McNicholl 2015, for
an account of the‘proletarianisation’of teacher education in the UK).
20 Part I: Becoming a Teacher: Teacher Education and Professionalism