Chapter 25
The Marketization of Teacher Education:
Threat or Opportunity?
Geoff Whitty
25.1 Introduction
Teacher education has often been a target for reform. In recent decades, the
dominant mantra as purveyed by OECD and McKinsey, and adopted by govern-
ments around the world, has been that improving the efficiency and equity of
schooling depends on getting and keeping good teachers. This has pointed to a need
to raise the quality of entrants to the teaching profession and improve the quality of
teacher education programmes. The conventional wisdom has been that we should
recruit better qualified students to teacher training courses, increase the length of
teacher training courses, make teacher training courses more academically rigorous,
incorporate teacher training colleges into universities and enhance government
and/or professional regulation of the training system.
25.2 The Case of England
England hasfitted this model from the 1970s onwards as most teacher training
colleges were incorporated into multi-faculty higher education institutions and
especially since 1984 when the then Conservative government of Margaret
Thatcher established a Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (CATE)
to review all initial teacher training providers and recommend whether they should
receive accreditation to provide courses leading to Qualified Teacher Status
G. Whitty (&)
University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]
G. Whitty
Bath Spa University, Bath, England, UK
©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_25
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