Politics, Policy, and Professionalism: The Changing Agenda of Teacher Education in England

• In Event: The Politics of Policy in Teacher Education: International Perspectives

Abstract

Objectives and Significance to the Field

Nearly 30 years since Margaret Thatcher’s government took direct control of the content and structure of teacher education in England as a strategy for improving educational outcomes; that strategy has been widely emulated across the world (OECD, 2005; McKinsey 2007,2010). But despite continuities – over time and internationally - the case of England also demonstrates the impact of domestic politics on the detail of the policy process.

Perspectives and Analyses

This paper explores the struggles around changing visions of teacher education policy in England. At the heart of these debates are differences of opinion about the nature of teacher professionalism –what it is and how it can be fostered. Over the last 30 years teacher education policy in England has become highly politicized as governments of different political persuasions have sought to use the teacher education system to propagate their own conception of professionalism. Based on a detailed analysis of key policy documents, ministerial speeches, and interviews with leading practitioners, the paper explores the role of politics at different levels.

Findings and Implications

The first part of the paper outlines changing agendas during the new Labour years of 1997 – 2010. Significantly, the broad vision of teacher professionalism - characterized by Tony Blair as the search for ‘the new professionalism’ (DfEE, 1998) - remained the same throughout this period. Driven primarily by neo-liberal ideas, the ‘new professional’ signaled a move away from a concern with ‘individual’ professionalism, where teachers form their own professional judgments on how best to teach, to a more ‘managed’ professionalism where such judgments are increasingly directed by schools and beyond that, by the state. Despite this ideological continuity, new Labour’s analysis of how to re-structure teacher education in order to achieve the new professionalism went through a number of different phases as the government struggled to achieve their vision. The second part of the paper explores the quite different politics being pursued by today’s Coalition government where there is a heady mixture of ideological strands. There is an acceptance of the neo-liberal goal of global competitiveness in education and the argument that teacher quality and teacher education are key. At the same time, there is a quite different vision of teacher professionalism from that of new Labour. Based on neo-conservative ideas, teaching is seen as primarily concerned with the maintenance of cultural heritage; “excellent teachers” therefore need strong subject knowledge and practical skills – nothing more. Such ideas, when combined with a government commitment to “rolling back the state,” initially led to aspirations to remove teacher education entirely from universities (DfE, 2010). However, more recent announcements (DfE, 2011) seem to imply that the need to maintain teacher supply, has, at least for the present, engendered a degree of political pragmatism in the policy process. The paper concludes by reflecting on what has been learned about the complexities in the globalization of teacher education policy (Rivzi & Lingard, 2010) by contrasting the politics of these two different historical periods.

Author

• John Furlong, The University of Oxford