My argument is that both universities and schools should be involved in educating
tomorrow’s teachers as thoughtful and responsive professionals, but the nature of
the relationship needs re-thinking, so that the role of universities in relation to
schools is seen as one of intellectual and conceptual support at the institutional level
(see Fig.37.1).
As afirst step, attention needs to be paid to building common knowledge as a
resource for aligning and mutually informing the different practices in which stu-
dent teachers are placed as learners. The work of teacher mentors is located within
the institutional practices of their schools. Consequently, their actions in the
activities of planning, teaching, etc. are likely, particularly in school practices that
value organisational professionalism, to be given direction by what matters at the
institutional plane. For example, Tan has found that most of the teacher mentors in
his study made judgments about student teachers’progress in relation to the criteria
used by Ofsted, the government inspectors who visit and grade schools (Tan, in
progress), even though these criteria were not directly relevant to student teachers’
progress through the ITE programme.
Some mentor-tutor links do draw on common knowledge as a resource and use it
as a second stimulus to give student teachers a coherent experience. Douglas gives
an example of one mentor who“...read academic literature out of interest and was
aware of the research work happening at the university...[and] his confidence in
adapting tasks to the needs of the student teacher came from a long-standing
relationship with the department at the university and his work with the tutor.”
(Douglas 2010 , p. 42); but he was a rare example in Douglas’s study and was using
common knowledge created when the ITE programme was initiated 20 years
earlier.
Worryingly the“Work of Teacher Educators”(WOTE) project revealed that
among the 13 UK teacher educators whose workloads were studied in detail,“re-
lationship maintenance” with placement schools was by far the most
time-consuming activity for most of the participants. The research team described
this work as follows:“Relationship maintenance included building, sustaining and
repairing the complex and fragile networks of personal relationships that allow
initial teacher education programmes, school partnerships and, indeed, HE
Education departments to function.”(Ellis et al. 2014 , p. 40). The mean amount of
time spent on maintaining relationships with schools and mentors was 13.192 h in
the data collection week, with a maximum of 31.0 h recorded, and it was frequently
carried out at the expense of engaging in research. The team’s argument, echoing
Evetts, is that as a result teacher educators have become proletarianised. The
consequence of spending so much time on“relationship maintenance”is that ITE is
being sidelined in an academic world which increasingly values heavy hitting
researchers. As a result, teacher education is in danger of being removed from the
University sector in some countries, whether it is placed entirely in schools or
privatised.
There is clearly work to be done to develop a less personal and more profes-
sional approach to understanding what matters for both mentors and university
tutors, so that the relationships are no longer so time-consuming. I am suggesting
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