The outcome is that, since its inception, teacher education has been continually
worked on by policy-makers; it has been constantly reformed, and elaborated or cut
back in different historic periods. Perhaps then it is not surprising that the
conservative-led coalition government and the current Conservative government
have maintained their crusade to reform teacher education.
But why has teacher education been susceptible to so much policy reforming
unlike other professional education and training such as that provided for medical
doctors or lawyers? Status and power differentials over time have something to do
with the forms of‘multiple constraints’ that have bedevilled the professional
preparation of the schoolteacher in England. Teacher education has been a‘late
arrival’to the academy as teaching was not initially a degree-level occupation and
was mainly delivered by teacher training colleges. All this has affected its status.
Teacher education itself is not of a piece but is marked by a hierarchy of status and
prestige within which different programmes and institutions are differentially
positioned. When Hencke ( 1978 : 15) was investigating reforms to teacher education
in a period of massive cuts and closures to the training colleges in the 1970s, he
claimed that many of the problems that confronted this provision lay in what he
called its‘unwholesome beginnings’. He argued that as teacher training started in
Southwark,‘a slum district of London’rather than in Oxbridge, right from the start,
it was denied status, resources and‘talent’in England. In the nineteenth century,
teachers were only trained to teach in the state-provided elementary schools that
predominantly served the working classes. The job of teaching, for it was not a
profession, was a non-graduate, intermediate occupation. As Hencke ( 1978 : 13)
pointed out:
Unlike theology, medicine or law, it (teacher training) has no historic claim to a university
tradition of academic excellence or respectability. It has more in common instead with
medieval craft guilds, whose apprenticeship system preceded modern technical education.Since its inauspicious start, teacher education has been characterised by an almost
continual set of conflicts, and an uneasy relation between the central and local state,
(and different sets of‘stakeholders’) over who should control and manage this
provision, and by demands for reform from an increasingly professionalised and
unionised teaching force as well as teacher educators. Many of these struggles and
contestations have centred on the academic profile of the teacher and the moves to
an all-graduate profession as well as the curriculum of teacher education and its
relationship to school-experience; all these competing discourses, these‘multiple
forms of constraint’, have a long and enduring history and have been sedimented
down and become reactivated at particular moments in time. One such perennial
discourse in England concerns the role of school experience. For example, Andrew
Bell, who with Joseph Lancaster set up thefirst apprenticeship style model—that of
the pupil teacher—emphasised that teachers are formed through in-school experi-
ence and not by attending lectures. What we see here is the genesis of an on-going
dispute between the place of theory and practice in pre-service teacher education.
486 M. Maguire