Reimagining a School – University Partnership: The Development of the Oxford Education Deanery Narrative

Abstract

We trace the recent development of the Oxford Education Deanery as an expansion of an initial teacher education partnership to include wider school-university collaboration in professional development, and in research. The current policy pressures in England are described on both school-university partnerships for initial teacher education, and on schools and universities generally. Then, using cultural historical theory, we show the recent development of a complex alliance through shared understandings of motives, which created common knowledge expressed within a common narrative. We argue that such re-imagined school-university partnerships offer an optimistic future for teacher education.