Abstract
ABSTRACT Recruiting, preparing and retaining high-quality teachers are recurrent themes of local, national and international education agendas. Traditional university-led forms of teacher education continue to be challenged, and defended, as nations strive to secure a teaching force equipped to achieve high-quality learning outcomes for all students. One commonly adopted policy solution has been the diversification of teacher preparation routes: the alternative certification agenda. In this article, we examine the entire history of one alternative route in place in England from 1997 to 2012, the Graduate Teacher Programme. Using one example of an employment-based programme, we argue that opportunities to engineer innovative and creative spaces in the face of the current teacher preparation reform agenda need to be seized. This case study, which is contextualised in both the international debates about alternative teacher certification routes and the current policy agenda in England, demonstrates the extent to which successive administrations have failed to learn from the lessons of the past in the rush to recycle policies and claim them as their own.
Highlights
The economic imperative for education systems to achieve high quality outcomes for all students has led many countries to diversify teacher preparation routes
The teacher education landscape in England has been affected by these debates, with successive governments implementing policy agendas to challenge the dominance of universities as leaders of teacher preparation programmes
In this paper we examine an employment based route to qualified teacher status offered in England between 1997 and 2012: the Graduate Teacher Programme (GTP)
Summary
The economic imperative for education systems to achieve high quality outcomes for all students has led many countries to diversify teacher preparation routes. A particular focus of this agenda is to address teacher supply and retention issues in the so-called high-status subjects (e.g. science, mathematics), and in schools located in areas of high deprivation and diversity This has included early entry programmes such as those under the Teach for All umbrella where ‘elite’ graduates commit to working, initially as unqualified teachers, with a full teaching assignment in schools in challenging circumstances before moving on to careers in other sectors (Darling-Hammond, 2017). Again, the twin drivers of an impending recruitment crisis and ideology were very much to the fore when, a quarter of a century ago, in its third term of office the Conservative government embarked upon a concerted drive to wrest control of initial teacher education from universities and move towards a ‘school-based’ model of teacher preparation This time period witnessed a move away from national commitments to comprehensive education laying the foundation for an accompanying shift from humanistic to technical conceptions of good teaching (Connell 2009). Transient and small scale, these programmes were adduced as evidence that schools could take on the majority of teacher training programmes despite no attempt to systematically evaluate the programmes (Furlong et al, 2000)
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