- teachers“as reflective, accomplished and enquiring professionals who have the
capacity to engage fully with the complexities of education and to be key actors
in shaping and leading educational change”(p4); - teaching as a profession based on high-quality provision;
- the key role that universities have to offer in the development of teachers;
- teaching as a complex and challenging occupation which requires a strong and
sophisticated professional development framework throughout every stage of
the career; - the link between teaching and leadership—good quality education is based on
both, throughout the career.
Not surprisingly, in the light of these values, Donaldson not only endorsed the
importance of higher education and research in teacher education, he was gently
critical that universities were not even more broadly engaged in teacher education.
Therefore we have seen in the last 5 years somewhat different policy trajectories
in the teacher education being offered in these two component nations of the United
Kingdom (see TEG 2016 ). We should also note that processes of review have been
underway in Northern Ireland and Wales as well and these have generally been
aligned towards the Scottish view of teaching and teacher education, thus making
England sometimes seem something of an outlier within the UK (see Teacher
Education Group 2016 ). However, the push for school-based teacher education is
not only alive in England, we see similar developments in many US states.
45.4 The BERA-RSA Inquiry
It was because of concern about the potential impacts on the educational research
infrastructure of government policies concerning teacher education across the four
nations of the UK, that BERA decided in 2012 to set up an inquiry into the
relationship between teacher education and research. It came as something of a
shock to many of us who had been working in university-based teacher education
for a number of years that the importance of the links between higher education and
teacher education were not widely understood. Indeed retrospectively and in spite
of many years of pamphleteering and campaigning against university-based teacher
education by right wing think tanks and their associates, we can see now that there
had been a failure to resist or respond positively to defend the sector (Childs and
Menter 2013 ). But yet, the evidence to demonstrate the importance of HE and
research in teaching was not immediately to hand. There were no studies that
convincingly demonstrated that educational outcomes were improved through
teacher education with high levels of university input or indeed of research input.
Thus the Inquiry, which was then established in a partnership with the Royal
Society for the Arts (RSA) set out to answer the following questions, more or less
ab initio:
672 I. Menter