Professional’ or ‘competent'? The roles of higher education and schools in initial teacher education

Abstract

This paper is an adaptation of a paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Conference in Lancaster, England, in September 1996. It describes the third and fourth phases of an investigation into the contribution that initial teacher education [ITE] brings to teachers’ professionalism, undertaken in 50 schools in the South of England, and examines teachers’ opinions on mentoring in schools. The first two phases have been reported earlier. The research developed against the background of changes in the shape of ITE, which led to some key responsibilities for the training of beginning teachers being transferred to schools. The Government, through the Department for Education (now the Department for Education and Employment), has specified competences which newly qualified teachers (NQTs) should have acquired and it was felt that this could lead to a narrowing of the concept of professionalism underpinning ITE courses. If NQTs’ notions of professionalism are being constructed by competency statements, this raises questions about their conception of what professionalism is within the teaching profession, and about what kind of future professionalism will be passed on to NQTs by teachers whose main training has been undertaken within schools, and whose educational theory has been acquired from the teacher(s) who mentored them. Teachers have now taken on a major responsibility for training new teachers and some of the questions that this responsibility raises have been put to teachers themselves in this project. The results from our survey show that teachers still have a varied set of ideas as to what professionalism is, ranging from the competences needed for effective teaching and learning within the classroom, to a wider view which includes attitudes, behaviour and commitment usually attributed to the extended professional. Within these views there is an ambivalent attitude towards the new school‐based arrangements: whilst on the one hand teachers appear to accept the need for a more school‐based approach, believing it to be where most learning takes place, on the other hand they feel their schools are being asked to do too much without being sufficiently resourced, and this might be leading to deprofessionalization of teachers.