Teacher Education in Scotland: More Than a Question of Values?

• In Event: 25.026 - Assessment and Accountability in Teacher Education Systems: Four Nations, Four Cases

Abstract

Context, Issue and Focus
Historically Scotland has always had a belief in education as a force for social change and in the power of the pedagogue in that process. Although international debates around standardization, choice, competition, teacher education and data-driven accountability have been present in Scottish educational discourse (Croxford and Raffe, 2007; Peters & Besley, 2014), Scotland has remained something of an outlier in the world of global educational reform (Author, 2016) with a distinctive “vernacular” form of globalization (Rizvi & Lindgard, 2010).

Teacher professionalism is at the heart of Scotland’s Teacher Education policy agenda. The General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) has developed professional standards underpinned by the themes of values, sustainability and leadership. The recent OECD report on Scottish Education described Scotland’s commitment to the centrality of teachers’ professional judgement as ‘an admirable counterbalance to the trends in many Western countries which have seen the status of teachers and teaching decline in past decades’ (OECD, 2016: 125).

Debates on the future of Teacher Education came into sharp relief following the publications of the Donaldson report, Teaching Scotland’s Future (2011), which argued that enhancing the quality of teaching and leadership were the levers most likely to influences Scotland’s high aspirations for its young people. Teacher Education, Donaldson suggested, should remain a partnership between Universities, Schools and Local Authorities but called for a strengthening of the teaching profession and set out 50 recommendations as a framework for change. In 2016, an evaluation of Teaching Scotland’s Future (IPSOS Mori, 2016) suggested that significant progress had been made. However, an OECD (2016) report argued that Scotland’s standards frameworks were difficult to put into practice and questioned how deeply the GTCS standards had become embedded in the professional culture of the Scottish educational system.

Theoretical Framework, Methodology and Significance
This paper tracks the complexity of policy developments in Teacher Education in Scotland since the publication of the Donaldson recommendations. Ball (2015) argues that although policies are complex, “differentially represented by different actors in different contexts (policy as text), but on the other hand, at the same time produced and formed by taken-for-granted and implicit knowledges and assumptions about the world and ourselves (policy as discourse)” (Ball, 2015:6). Most policy analysis focuses on what is written and said rather than how statements are formed and made possible. Using the framework of knowledge as text and discourse, this paper offers an analysis of the policy context in Scotland by identifying points of tension between policy and practice emerging from three policy texts (The Donaldson Report, its evaluation, and the OECD report) and uses these as the basis of interviews with key stakeholders involved as an advisory committee on the Donaldson report (Scottish Government, GTCS, Teacher Education, Teachers’ Professional Organisations).

The study offers insights into the complexities of the relationship amongst research, policy and practice, the resistances and contestations, even when there is perceived to be a degree of consensus in the value positions of all three communities.

Author

• Louise Hayward, University of Glasgow