students’poor performances on international tests have created a sense of panic
among policy makers and politicians. While their concerns are arguably based on a
misreading or misuse of PISA and other data (Gorur and Wu 2015 ) and an
ideological/cultural battle over the purposes and content of schooling, nevertheless
they have had a significant impact on how TE is now conceived and implemented.
In this chapter, we compare and contrast these issues in three jurisdictions:
Australia, England and, to a lesser extent, Scotland. The cases of Australia and
England are arguably founded on similar philosophical accounts of the nature of
teacher education, although England is further down the path of transforming these
into changed practice. Australia is moving in similar directions, with a‘(re)turn to
the practical’and a shift away from teaching as a‘research-based profession and
intellectual activity’towards a technicist craft-based occupation that relies on the
application of particular clinical skills (Beauchamp et al. 2015 : 160). While
England has demonstrated a distinct move towards school-based ITE (Menter and
Hulme 2011 ), in Australia TE remains the domain of universities, albeit increas-
ingly delivered at postgraduate level and in partnerships with schools. On part-
nerships, Australia has much in common with Scotland (Menter and Hulme 2011 ;
Donaldson 2011 ), although Scotland differs philosophically from Australia and
England in its resistance to craft-based models and a concerted move towards
greater research-informed teaching.
The chapter draws on key reviews of TE from each of these nations, including:
the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG) reportAction Now:
Classroom Ready Teachers(TEMAG 2014b) in Australia, the Importance of
TeachingWhite Paper in England (DfE 2010 ), andTeaching Scotland’s Futurein
Scotland (Donaldson 2011 ). We also draw on related reports and the public
statements of politicians who advocate various policy moves. Indicative of the
different approaches in these jurisdictions, the reviews in Australia and England
identify the‘problem’of TE in similar ways with similarly narrowly conceived
solutions. In contrast, the Donaldson Review has been described as“progressive, if
not radical, and forward thinking”(Menter and Hulme 2011 : 394), particularly in its
propositions for reform even if starting with many of the same concerns as in
Australia and England.
We identify four assumptions evident in and constitutive of the prevailing logic
of TE in OECD nations (particularly Australia, England and Scotland):
- Students are underperforming by international and community standards;
- There is a direct cause–effect relation between student performance and teacher
performance (i.e. teaching is all that matters); - Teachers’performance does not meet the required standards, partly because of
the low quality of TE students and of TE itself; and - Better TE requires: more discipline depth, a proven approach, more time spent
in schools and better school-university relations.
We draw on the above documents to show how the logic has shaped the ways in
which TE policy is framed as responses to particular diagnoses. We also show that
522 T. Gale and S. Parker