(QTS) (DES 1984 ). Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Schools (subsequently Ofsted)
was charged with reporting to CATE on the quality of provision and whether
courses met set criteria in terms of their content, a role that was significantly
expanded over the subsequent 20 years under successive governments. From 1992
onwards, a succession of sets of competences and standards for trainees to meet
were drawn up by government and its Teacher Training Agency (and successor
bodies) and there was growing emphasis on partnerships between higher education
and schools and increases in the time all trainees needed to spend in school. At the
same time, a number of new routes to QTS were introduced. A combination of the
teaching standards and the Ofsted inspection criteria ensured that all routes were, to
a significant extent, preparing teachers for a common concept of professionalism.
With colleagues, I was involved during the 1990s in a research project, funded
by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, investigating the ways in
which these reforms were being implemented and their impact on teacher profes-
sionalism. Among itsfirst outputs, in 1992, was a topography of initial teacher
education in England and Wales (Barrett et al. 1992 ). In what follows, I explore just
how much the landscape of teacher education in England has changed in the
subsequent 20 years. Since Wales has had a devolved administration since the late
1990s, its approach to education, including teacher education, has begun to diverge
significantly from the English system described below.
When the New Labour government left office in 2010, there were three main
routes into school teaching in England, all of which led to QTS, which (with some
limited exceptions) was a requirement for anyone teaching in a publicly maintained
school, including most Academies (autonomous schools rather like Charter Schools
in the USA):
Partnerships led by higher education institutions (HEIs)
These provided both undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications. The former included
three- and four-year BEd and BA(QTS) courses. The number of undergraduate trainees had
decreased from 9,770 in 1998-99 to 7,620 in 2007-08. Most trainees, around 27,000 a year,
now followed one-year postgraduate courses, called the Postgraduate Certificate in
Education (PGCE).
School-centred initial teacher training schemes (SCITTs)
These were consortia of schools that offered training towards the PGCE. The consortium
itself arranged the training and channelled the funding for placements, as compared with
HEI-led partnerships, where the university arranged placements and channelled the funding
to schools. Nevertheless, universities validated the SCITTs’PGCEs.
Employment-based routes (EBITTs)
These involved‘on-the-job’training and fell into three groups: the Graduate Teacher
Programme (GTP), Overseas Trained Teacher Programme (OTTP) and TeachFirst, a
scheme to bring high-flying new graduates into teaching in challenging schools. They all
led to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) and some, including TeachFirst after some initial
hesitation, also led to a PGCE, an identical qualification to the other routes.In total, in 2009–10, there were 234 providers offering routes into teaching,
including 75 HEI-led partnerships, 59 SCITTs and 100 EBITTs. However, some of
374 G. Whitty