university or HEA procedures to create strong, valid and focused platforms for the
development of such pedagogical enquiry.
The economic downturn brought widespread austerity and many cuts in edu-
cation budgets, including a reduction in funding for the Higher Education sector. Of
particular relevance here was that funding for the HEA was reduced. This was
particularly significant for teacher educators’professional development as it meant
the closure of ESCalate—the education specialist area which had supported many
initiatives for teacher educators. These had included the production of induction
guidelines (Boyd et al. 2011 ), professional training events and the provision of
small-scale grants to research practice. Some of these initiatives, including national
induction programmes, have managed to continue drawing on other funding
sources, but many have disappeared.
A further negative influence on provision for teacher educators’professional
learning has been the effects of repeated national research audits. As indicated
earlier, these have re-defined what is meant by‘research’, and narrowed the criteria
for‘what counts’as a valid research output and who is acknowledged to be a
researcher. This in turn has limited some universities’ formal support for
practice-based research and for the development of teacher educators as active
researchers. Since many teacher educators come into Higher Education without a
doctorate or sustained experience of research, the lack of professional development
in this area may mean that opportunities to participate fully in academic life as both
researcher and teacher become restricted. But, again, it should be noted that generic
university programmes may offer opportunities for the development of high quality
practitioner or pedagogical research.
As Boyd et al. ( 2011 ) have argued, most professional learning for teacher
educators happens, not through formal provision and organized programmes, but
through informal workplace learning. This includes learning from and in the daily
arenas of practice and from the face-to-face and virtual networks or communities to
which teacher educators belong. An example of this kind of creative, informal
learning opportunity is that in some of the new school-led pre-service routes
HE-based educators are now working in ways which simultaneously develop their
own professional learning and that of the school-based educators with whom they
were working. In these instances, mutually beneficially development of shared
practices and second order knowledge (Murray 2002 ) of how student teachers learn
creates important, if tacit and often under-valued forms of professional learning for
both groups of teacher educators.
In England, then, professional development provision for school-based teacher
educators has expanded since 2010, whilst that for HE-based teacher educators has
been reduced and diversified by the economic downturn and recent‘reforms’to
ITE. Because of this, HEI provision has been become more important for the latter
group. Despite all the weaknesses of this institutional model, identified above, most
HEIs are still able to create some formal and informal learning opportunities for the
teacher educators working within them. Professional associations and learned
societies, including the much reduced HEA, still also offer some formal learning
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