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A promotion of teacher professionality:Higher education and initial teachereducation in England and WalesConor Galvin aa University of Cambridge , UKPublished online: 05 Aug 2006.

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Studies in Higher Education Volume 21, No. I, 1996 81

A Promotion of Teacher Professionality: higher education and initial teacher education in England and Wales C O N O R GALVIN University of Cambridge, UK

A B S T R A C T Recent moves to relocate initial teacher education in England and Wales within a substantively school-led context are generally held to constitute an unprecedented and fundamental challenge to existing practices and relations in this field. This paper attempts to locate these developments in a broader frame of changing relations between state and profession. In order to contextualise the discussion that follows, the opening section of the paper contains an outline of the evolution of general notions of profession, professional preparation and higher education as these and their interrelations have been contested over almost two centuries by practitioner and state in England and Wales. The paper then explores some recent government interventions into initial teacher education for characteristic evidence that can illustrate the precise nature of these interventions. Finally, it seeks to place the interventions within a coherent policy perspective with regard to the unique interrelation of teaching and the state in the contemporary English and Welsh context.

Teaching and the State: a chronology o f discord

Any study of the notions of profession and professional preparation over the past 200 years will identify movements towards some form of higher order training and related awarding of credentials for those who fulfil certain roles in society. For example, the proto-professional trades of doctor, lawyer arid engineer have all at various times since the late eighteenth century followed this path in their own way, leading to the modern medical, legal and engineering professions. The catalysts varied from one trade to another and from one country to another, as did the precise form that the process followed, but what emerged gradually in each context was a guarded occupational calling with its own regulatory bodies and concomi- tant structures of advancement and control, coupled with clearly defined links to higher education and state sanction, often in the form of a charter. When taken in parallel with others similarly professionalised, what resulted was arguably a stratified, interlocked, politi- cally endorsed social order with the nascent professions well placed to benefit both financially and status wise in return for their maintenance functions within that order.

It is interesting in view of the almost incessant subsequent debate--philosophical and political--on the qualitative nature of teaching, that of all trades well placed to lay claim to the status of profession in the last two centuries, teaching singularly 'failed' to find a niche in this arrangement. After all, the general mode of entry into teaching in the late eighteenth century was comparable to that of the other proto-professions and superior to many. It

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comprised study at one of the old universities where mastery of subject opened the way-- among other options--to a position at a public school or grammar school or, increasingly throughout the nineteenth century, within the expanding university system. Why then did such professionalisation not occur?

Explanations of this 'failure' are usually reduced to a unique combination of circum- stances. A growth in the population able to afford and for various reasons willing to purchase a public school education was accompanied from the first half of the nineteenth century by a massive upsurge in the demand for 'basiC--that is elementary--schooling at a more universal level of provision. This resulted both in a steady increase in the number of public schools and a veritable explosion in the number of elementary schools nation-wide. Together these far outstripped the ability of the old order to cope with the demand for teachers (Laqueur, 1977). And while public schools consequently experienced some difficulties recruiting teachers, elementary schools--whether Church or state sponsored--were in an almost impossible situation in recruitment terms. This led to several interrelated develop- ments. Under Church aegis a number of teacher colleges emerged to sponsor pragmatic sets of principles to suit the rather pragmatic demands of that context (Dunford & Sharp, 1990). Much mid- to late-nineteenth century elementary schooling was therefore set in an almost missionary context with a patriarchal concern for godliness and morality infusing much that was undertaken. The national pupil teacher scheme and a second but more secularly oriented set of colleges emerged under state aegis over the same period. The comparative strengths and weaknesses of these systems of teacher preparation has been the subject of considerable comment and controversy (see for example, Thomas, 1990). But two particular points they raise in relation to teacher professionalisation concern us here.

First, the colleges recruited in the main from a constituency other than that of the traditional 'university man'; those entering colleges were by and large from the 'rising' working and lower middle classes (Gardner, 1993), and increasingly as the century wore on they were women. One result of this was the emergence of a class-related differentiation between elementary and public school teachers (who mostly continued to come from a university background). Another was a feminisation of teaching (Steedman, 1988) which may have further removed the trade from its counterparts; women practitioners were, after all, scarce in other professions. Second, the increasing unease with which successive nineteenth- century governments viewed the produce of British schooling was matched by attempts to draw control of the practice of schooling into a state orbit, albeit at a locally administered level (Gordon et al., 1991). One result of this was the ongoing and often bitter dispute between Church and State over the control of schooling and the preparation of school teachers (Dunford & Sharp, 1990). State intervention inevitably had implications for the training of the teachers who would staff the schools and questions were raised about the academic standing of many elementary school teachers in both Church and State schools and the nature of the training that they were receiving (Thomas, 1990).

The importance of these points is that they highlight specific circumstantial barriers to the development of any consensual notion of teacher professionalisation in nineteenth-cen- tury Britain; barriers comprising aspects of class, gender and academic status.

Clearly, these circumstances owed much to factors including industrialisation and urbanisation in Britain, and the emergence of industrial rivals in continental Europe, and to the reactions of the state to these developments. What is critical to this present consideration is that the resulting arrangements transformed the school as a social institution and politicised what might otherwise have remained a developing agenda of professionalisation. The tenor of that change is where the real significance lies; from a position of laissez-faire and disinclination towards involvement in the provision of schooling and the attendant staffing

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Higher Education and Initial Teacher Education 83

structures at the start of the nineteenth century, the state moved by the end of the century to establish a consolidated central Board of Education with oversight of a large, nation-wide network of elementary schools---which made demands on teacher supply that could only be met by the development of a. state-supported teacher training sector--as well as a growing if highly localised number of 'post-elementary' schools. Additionally the state took control of the teaching content of the elementary school sector and the terms and conditions of those working within the system through the Revised Code and payment by results. By 1902 it had also moved to finance through changes to the laws concerning the use of local rate aid many of the Church schools until then outside its remit, a process not fully completed until Butler's much vaunted settlement of 1944.

With the rising power of this Board of Education and the new local education authorities during the first half of this century that grip was tightened, so cementing the relationships between aspects of schooling, teacher preparation and the state. Indeed such was the place of the state in these interrelations that it could totally dominate the direction and pace of teaching's development as a profession. All that realistically stood in the way was the diversity of positions held by inter-branch interests within the board as to what that direction should be. This was a unique position with respect to an occupational group. It can be argued that this movement from laissez-faire to predominance represented a politicisation of the struc- tures of provision and control in a way that may have made it difficult, if not impossible, for educationists to controvert and thus deprived the trade of two key professionalising traits-- gatekeeping ability and command of conditions of service. But does this mean that any process of professionalisation was impossible or does it mean that any such process would of necessity be markedly different to that of other occupational groups? There is a strong argument to be made that the latter holds and that teaching began to undergo a two-tier, two-speed progress toward professional status on its own terms.

The progress was two-tier because the experiences of those who taught in the public school and endowed sectors differed markedly from that of teachers involved with burgeoning elementary provision. The former groups had in one sense less need of a process that averred their professionalism; they already held university qualifications which were deemed adequate credential because, as Thomas (1990) noted, the public school master operated in an 61ite world of schools which was an extension of Oxford and Cambridge. The possession of a degree (especially if accompanied by holy orders) was therefore seen as a wholly adequate qualification for teaching. Moreover, as a numerically small 61ire they probably saw no advantages in an alliance that would group them with those who taught the children of the poor, whose conditions of work were usually far less favourable and whose social origins--in the main--less privileged than their own. Elementary school teachers on the other hand, were the product of the 'rising classes' who valued education not so much for its liberalising endowments--although these were not insignificant--as for its economically liberating poten- tial. For these and other reasons elementary school teaching became one of the few avenues of social advancement open to women and 'rising' working-class men in the later part of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth (Widdowson, 1983). The awarding of credentials was for this population a significant issue. Not only did it open the way to enhanced remuneration, through what personal and professional studies the credential process involved, it also primed the teacher for a world of work by instilling qualities that provided the basis of professionality. The institutionalisation of this process was advanced through the growth of the teacher colleges, particularly in the final decades of the last century--in the aftermath of the Cross Report (1888)--and the early part of this century, although it must be noted such colleges could still only supply about one in 12 of the teachers needed to staff the elementary sector in 1900 (Pigott, 1987).

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The progress was two-speed because the provision of an institutional framework how- ever inadequate and basic at first--to supply trained elementary teachers was well under way by the time a similar training began to appear for the growing 'post-elementary' sector, which would later develop into the secondary sector. Training provision for elementary teachers had progressed from a singular location (Borough Road) in 1808, through the monitorial schools of Lancaster and Bell to the more sophisticated and Committee of Council sanctioned residential training colleges, many of which operated along the lines advocated by Stow around 1837. By 1847, 20 residential training colleges were in existence and by 1900 there were in excess of 4000 elementary teachers in training in these and similar institutions (Thomas, 1990). The first indications of a similar desire to formalise training for post-ele- mentary school teachers did not appear until the advent of the College of Preceptors in 1846 and Teachers Training Syndicate of the University of Cambridge (1879). These were followed in the 1890s by the establishment of a series of university day training colleges which, although intended for the elementary teacher, contributed much to the training of post-elementary teachers also. Additionally, the content of university education itself also underwent radical change over the period with the emergence of not only new universities throughout Britain but also with 'new' subject areas--such as geography and metallurgy-- and the growing influence of the rationalist/scientific schools of thought across the entire sector.

However, by the end of the nineteenth century the process of defining a teacher-specific professionalism was still incomplete. The rapidity of developments during the nineteenth century to put into place a national elementary school system had caused a piecemeal and minimalist approach to suffice in the training of teachers to staff that system. This has long been attributed to the lack of any consistent policy for the education of teachers and a resulting tendency for teacher education to follow changes in provision (Dobson, 1973). Much criticism at the time and since has been levelled at what is perceived as the mechanis- tic, narrow and illiberal foci of such training. But what is easily overlooked is the institutional framework that these voluntary colleges helped comprise, along with the day training colleges and the local education authority colleges organised subsequent to the Education Act of 1902. This institutional framework was to be seminal in providing centres for the ideological forces that shaped the emergence of teacher professionalism in England and Wales over this century. Moreover, the degree of distrust and even hostility that had developed between teachers in the university-supplied 61ite sector and those Of the elementary sector--though this began to dissipate towards the end of the nineteenth century--was Strong enough to ensure that no unifying professional association, council or institute could emerge in England and Wales during that time. The legacy of this remains in the absence to the present day of any such professional authority.

In the absence of a professional council the way was open for an alternative system of professional legitimation to develop. The unique institutional infrastructure of voluntary, local education authority and day training colleges--which later became the colleges of higher education and the university institutes and departments of education--effectively filled this function for the first four decades of this century, but only in so far as it was possible to do so with the awarding of credentials remaining ultimately in the hands of the state and the funding of the sector dependent on the worth of the service as perceived by governments of the day. With the sanctioning of free secondary education for all in the aftermath of World War II and the rise of the polytechnics as a force in teacher training this position was greatly strengthened, leading to the emergence of a coherent, higher education set teacher training sector. By the tireless quest of its various constituent parts for higher academic standing this teacher training sector endeavoured to become a presence in the higher education arena.

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Higher Education and Initial Teacher Education 85

From catering for the training of only about 4000 student teachers at the turn of the century, the teacher education sector has in recent times seen approximately 24,000 students annually enter conventional courses of initial teacher training in about 90 institutions of higher education across England and Wales. These courses--roughly 300 in total--comprise various full-time and part-time routes and lead to third-level qualifications such as a BA, BEd or BSc or to ~i Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE). At any one moment almost 50,000 students are undertaking such courses of study (Barrett et al., 1992). As such, teacher education represents a significantly large sector of higher education. However, it was only since the publication of the second and third of what Brooks (1991) describes as 'the post-war trilogy' of reports on teachers and teacher education--the McNair (1944), Robbins (1963) and James (1972) reports--that teacher education has held anything like a secure place in the field of higher education. These reports in particular sought to operationalise that vision of professionalism which had evolved over almost a century; with the placing of a personal, liberal higher education and a rigorous professional preparation on an equal footing across the constituency. Recognised higher education accreditation was to be the benchmark in all of this and the teacher education institutions its arbiters.

The significance of this necessarily brief overview of notions of profession and pro- fessional preparation in their historical relation to teacher education, is perhaps twofold:

1. It illustrates the unparalleled role of the state in gaining control of the spheres of technical practice and conditions of labour vis-d-vis teaching and the attendant inability of educa- tionists to take to themselves the outward trappings of a profession; such as a registration council and a disciplinary body or, more critically, their inherent tractions of awarding credentials and framing a professionalising strategy.

2. It also illustrates the unique part played by higher education in the professional prep- aration of teachers and the evolution of the institutional base of this preparation from a point in the early nineteenth century where teaching was part-within and part-without the existing system through the development of its own training structures in the voluntary, local authority, and day colleges to the convergence of these and the rise of a higher education sector powerful enough by the late 1960s to begin challenging the state for many of the professional prerogatives which it (the state) had previously retained.

Thus the quest since the early days of this century for a teacher-specific professionalism has been integrated, in a very real sense, with the search for ways to circumvent the state- constructed para-professionalism of the previous 50 years--a search led and sustained by an evolving confidence derived from the increasing importance of higher education in teacher education.

One critical factor that this account has so far neglected is that of teaching practitioners taking on themselves the ethics and aspirations of professional standing even without the wholehearted endorsement of the state for that stance. This personal visioning and living of professionalism may be termed professionali~ after Hoyle (1983), and there can be no doubt that this has been a consistent feature of teaching at every grade down the years or that the Robbins and James Reports served greatly to increase this sense of professional self-worth among practising and newly entering teachers. In fact it is probably in such professionality that teaching has found most respite from the low social standing imposed upon it by its particularly dependent relation with the state, as briefly outlined in the preceding paragraphs.

The thrust towards professionalisation of teaching since the early part of this century has therefore come to encompass this search at the institutional and individual level for a sustainable ideology of practice constituted in part by a core of personal education, in part

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86 G. Galvin

by a body of pedagogical knowledge and in part by qualities of routine premised on their successful integration; and this search has been undertaken against a background of ongoing structuring and radical restructuring of the organisational framework within which teacher education is set and the teaching act pursued.

Changing Governance and Practices in In i t ia l Teacher Education

The preceding outline of the respective positions of state and teaching practitioner constitutes a background against which the consideration of recent initiatives to move initial training of teachers into a school-led frame may profitably be set.

It has long been a truism in Britain that school-based experience is an inherent part of initial teacher training. Indeed there is considerable evidence to suggest that this has been a consistently expanding aspect of good practice over the past 20 years, notwithstanding recent interventions to legislate on the issue (XVilkin, 1990; Barrett et al., 1992). A flourishing tendency to integrate theory and practice into interdisciplinary, school-based 'reflective' models of professional preparation--often drawing on the work of Donald Sch6n (1983, 1987)--has also been observed (e.g. "~7ilkin, 1990; Barrett et al., 1992; Furlong et al., 1993), and its professionalising potential commented on (Barnett, 1990). Nevertheless, the past decade has seen a series of significant policy interventions into the substance and structure of teacher education in general and its school-based training aspects in particular. These include the establishment of the Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (CATE) in 1984, an ongoing series of government circulars and related legislation on initial teacher training (Department of Education and Science [DES], 1984, 1989; Department for Edu- cation [DTE], 1992, 1993), and the introduction in the late 1980s of new access routes to teaching in the state sector (especially the Articled and Licensed Teacher Schemes).

The first of these interventions introduced into the accreditation of teacher education an authority in the form of an unelected body chosen by the Secretary of State for Education. The second intervention, as embodied in the circulars on initial teacher education reform, represents an attempt to redefine the nature of teaching proficiency in terms of increasingly tight competence-based routines and to reconstruct the routes to this proficiency. In general terms, this is to be achieved by involving practising teachers to a much greater extent in the design, implementation and assessment aspects of the training courses. Broadly, this involve- ment is along the same lines as workplace supervision and training management in contem- porary National Vocational Qualifications (NVQ) practices. The language is superficially that of empowerment of teachers and the tenor one of raising the profile of serving teachers through facilitating their involvement in the training of a new generation of practitioners; an enterprise where they are seen to be sidelined if not actively excluded. The third intervention, in particular the Licensing initiative, was the most immediately controversial. Articled teacher training was quickly subsumed into the world of initial teacher education; all-graduate intake and the presence of higher education input virtually guaranteeing this. (However, the cost of running articling schemes has been such that they are to be abandoned by the DfE at the end of 1994.) Licensing, on the other hand, received a sceptical reception although presented as a means of opening doors to 'individuals [with] a potentially valuable contribution to make to the schools', especially 'mature entrants making a career change for whom a period in full-time study would be a disincentive to recruitment' ~ E S , 1988). It was hoped that considerable numbers of otherwise 'disenfranchised' individuals would be drawn into teach- ing through licensing. In this licensing offered a seemingly straightforward 'no-nonsense' solution to a pressing policy issue. After all, government was responsible through the DES for teacher supply and its existing arrangements were dearly failing.

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Higher Education and Initial Teacher Education 87

Taken together these interventions represent a particular construction of where and how initial teacher training should be deployed, in what it should consist and how it should be audited and accredited. If taken in conjunction with concurrent developments in the reform of schools and the practices of schooling and with the attenuation of local authority within education, the emerging picture is one of considerable complexity but clear intent; the institutionalisation of a particular and specific ideology within the education system, follow- ing the dismantling of the existing order.

Closer attention to each of the initiatives would seem to substantiate this analysis. In itseIf CATE gained a reputation for an unexpected degree of non-partisan comment and a consensual approach that was valued by the institutions which it validated, and set about its allotted task with a commendable degree of energy, though the institutional vetting activity of CATE was not always seen as in the best interests of teaching as a profession (cf. Barton et al., 1992). Notwithstanding this, the formation of the Council was a political move to centralise the machinery of teacher accreditation in what could be seen as a dangerously malleable arrangement. It also represented the institutionalisation of the procedure in a way that brooked little dissension and the removal of a major part of the influence over academic governance so gradually established by the teacher training sector. Recent policy interventions into education have been generally in two or three stages. First is the reconstruction of existing institutions and arrangements. This involves a preliminary 'reorganisation' on a centralised model with some semblance of existing structures and routines being retained. Then follows a radical sequestration of structure and procedure. This second stage almost invariably leads to a deregulated, democratically distanced, service-industry modelled agency. CATE has now been replaced by the Teacher Training Agency (TTA). This arguably represented a victory of government ideology over professional interest and a clear indication that after several decades of relatively non-interventionist strategies, the state was again moving to assert its predominance in the relation.

The circulars mentioned above add collaterally to this thrust for reasserted state pre- dominance in relation to teaching preparation. Some commentators, notably Hargreaves (1993), have welcomed these moves towards what is termed, after Bines (1992), the post-technocratic model of teacher education. They see such moves as fundamentally consist- ent with the emerging new organisational and personal development cultures in schools in the wake of recent management, curriculum and assessment reform. Others are more guarded. For example, Furlong has made the pertinent observation that while the central motif of the earlier circulars (DES 3/84 and 24/89) is 'integration', with the focus on integrating the higher education and school-based elements of their courses, the means by which this is to be achieved is closed down completely in the later missives (DIE 9/92, and DIE 14/93); 'partnership' is now the determined route with schools as equal partners in the venture (Furlong et aL, 1993). There were, Furlong argues from recent research, pressing principled and pragmatic reasons behind the decisions of many courses at the time of survey not tO follow the partnership route as it has been constrained by government intervention. These include issues to do with lag between training institutions and schools in areas of rapid development (such as craft and design), working with access and mature students, courses that explicitly encourage a variety of training settings (such as those intending to develop curriculum leaders) as well as size of course intake, geographic spread of partner schools, ensuring consistency within and across partner schools; in short, issues of appropriateness, resources, communication and coherence. Furthermore, it has been argued that the language of competency is in fact a blind for a fundamental resequestration of knowledge in a particularly mechanistic and illiberal form with inherent notions of audit and authority that

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disconnect from liberal understandings of education and the educated life (Fielding, 1984; Short, 1984; Norris, 1991).

This brings us to the third intervention; the introduction of the licensed teacher route to qualified teacher status. The background to licensing has been documented in depth elsewhere (Galvin, 1994), so what follows is intended primarily to illustrate the development of the initiative and the lessons that it offers. In particular it seeks to highlight certain key characteristics of the scheme: its origins as a political rather than practitioner led initiative, and its inherent weaknesses as a form of initial teacher training. Licensing was put forward in 1988 as a pragmatic solution to the pressing issue of teacher supply. The fundamental difference between licensing and other entry routes into teaching is that licensing leads only to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) and unlike other short course entry (e.g. Postgraduate Certificate in Education or 2 year BEd), licensees need not be graduates. In addition, schemes are run solely by local education authorities (LEAs) or grant-maintained schools (GMS) and need not necessarily involve higher education institutions. In the light of these characteristics it is perhaps easier to appreciate that there was probably more to the establishment of the route than was immediately apparent. It is unlikely that teacher shortages alone would have been enough to move the Government towards rescinding the 'all-graduate entry' requirement that had been so firmly in place since the James Report. Such a move would represent a direct attack on notions of academic standing--the higher-edu- cation/teacher-education link--which are embedded deeply in teachers' professionality.

Why then did it happen? To appreciate with any degree of completeness the thinking behind the initiative it is important to bear in mind the profoundly anti-professional and anti-theoretical aspects of that ideological voice which came to be known in Britain and elsewhere as the New Right (Levitas, 1986). At its simplest the message was highly populist: aU professional collegiality was suspect because it was open to cartel influence/ producer capture and so anti-market; and the ability to do was championed at the expense of 'theory', a hallmark of such cartelism, at best an irrelevance and at worst a means of exploiting 'the consumer'. Of considerable significance, then, in the decision to make so radical a departure in initial teacher preparation in Britain was the influence of this New Right; a voice that since the late 1960s had consistently denigrated progressive education and--since the mid-1980s in particular--the 'collusion' of higher education in perpetuating such practices.

The second term of recent Conservative government witnessed an upsurge in the amount of comment on social and political issues being generated and disseminated by groups and individuals on the emerging New Right in Britain. Education was no exception to this trend. In particular, the period saw a series of attacks from such individuals and 'think tanks' on teacher education (e.g. Shaw, 1986; Sexton, 1987; O'Hear, 1988 and Lawlor, 1990). These attacks were formidable, not because they represented a cogent ideological assault on the teacher education sector which was already radically restructuring its activities in the light of evolving notions of partnership and school-based training. They did not, and were in fact riven by contradictory claims and demands (Whitty, 1989). But these various strands were reconcilable on some issues, noticeably that of a National Curriculum and the 'reform' of teacher education. What was formidable was the undoubted influence of the groups involved on the making of policy at the very top levels of Conservative government (Ranelagh, 1991; Chitty, 1992). Some degree of this influence in the education context may be gauged from the number of New Right tenets that found their way into official Conserva- tive policy in the run up to the 1983 election and in the legislative backwash from that Conservative victory: 'opting out', a national curriculum, standardised attainment tests, privatisation of the schools inspectorate (Her Majesty's Inspectorate), market-led 'contract'

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Higher Education and Initial Teacher Education 89

funding for schools and more recently--and central to the present consideration--'deregula- tion' of the teacher training 'cartel'.

Regardless of this policy context, however, there are fundamental lessons to be learnt from the progress of the licensing initiative. If licensing were to be judged solely in terms of its stated obiectives, its overall success would seem highly questionable. The scheme certainly had some impact in opening up a route to QTS for overseas trained teachers and for secondary school instructors, but it could be argued that these would have been working in their respective sectors anyway; all that had changed is that they could now do so with the status and pay of a teacher. In addition many licensees came from ethnic minority groups (as much as 75% of intake on some of the London schemes, 41% nationally) and almost two-thirds were women (Galvin, 1994). In all of this licensing proved laudable.

However, economies of scale proved extremely difficult across licensed teacher training provision. Of the 59 licensing LEAs in 1990-91, 41 catered for less than 10 licensees but each of these was obliged to provide on-site and off-site training that would typically involve LEA inspectorate and advisory staff as well as those at school level and those providing the necessary administrative back-up. Moreover within these schemes the range of training needs varied widely. Four out of every 10 licensed teachers on the schemes surveyed were in fact first degree holders and almost 8% were higher degree holders though there were sharp variations between the London picture and that for the rest of England. Outside of London just under seven out of every 10 licensed teachers held first degrees and about one in 10 held higher degrees such as a Phi) or a Masters degree. In the London area less than two in 10 held first degrees and only 3% held higher degrees (Galvin, 1994). This perhaps related to the fact that almost three-quarters of London licensed teachers were primary phase. What- ever underscored the trend, matching training needs and training provision was clearly a most difficult proposition and costly in terms of resources and personnel. The complexity of costing this exercise was such that none of the LEAs surveyed in 1992 for the Modes of Teacher Education (MOTE) project had even attempted to do so. This meant that it was next to impossible to calculate with any accuracy the true cost of implementing the scheme nationally. All that could be concluded with any certainty was that it cost significantly more than originally had been estimated.

Additionally, quality proved impossible to police across the scheme. The woolly central administration through which the scheme was introduced and financed left licensing open to diverse interpretations at provider level. A wholly idiosyncratic training provision resulted which varied widely in terms of selection process, on-site and off-site support for licensed teachers, mentor selection and training, payment pattems, assessment and accreditation arrangements, and even QTS requirements. This led to as many variations of the scheme as there were LEAs and schools participating. All they had in common was that they differed. This represents an almost impossible context against which to evaluate a policy initiative, especially one which has at its heart so radical a change in the initial preparation of teachers.

Recent DfE data suggest that the situation has if anything become even more fractious over the past year, with only a handful of schemes in existence whose intake exceeds 10 licensees. Ironically, one of these is the scheme which has most closely modelled its practices on those of higher education based teacher education. Its activities are guided and supported by the local higher education institution and externally examined, and its all-graduate intake works towards higher education accreditation analogous to a Postgraduate Certificate in Education.

C o m m e n t

From the preceding discussion we can begin to appreciate that none of these recent

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interventions into teacher education are anodyne or accidental. They stem from a coherent policy base that is firmly grounded in a particular and specific ideology~ towards which the state is increasingly orienting its treatment of teachers as an interest group.

In brief, the introduction of the CATE has proved a transitional device to allow a radical sequestration of the structure and procedures of teacher education and the institution of an 'appropriate' agency of governance, the TTA. It remains to be seen how this new agency operationalises its given responsibilities, but an abiding regard for the formative role of higher education in the professionality of teachers is unlikely to figure prominently in its mission. By legislating for its particular vision of partnership, the government is not only failing to take account of documented problems of appropriateness, resources~ communication and coher- ence, it is dictating for a model of teacher training that is reductive in terms of the academic requirements facing a student teacher and locked into a competency-based, need-to-know formulation of what constitutes teaching and learning. While there are obvious organisational and governance dividends for this narrowing of teachers' education, there are no manifest personal rewards for the deep cost in professionality which would most likely result. The licensing initiative was introduced through government regulations, financed on a bid/con- tract basis out of central funds and was intended to test notions of 'freeing the market' by removing the 'monopoly' of control exercised by teacher educators over the training of teachers. In these, it displayed the trappings of the rather curious modem Tory view of a free market; a rhetoric of diversity and deregulation and a reality of centralised authority and control through audit and funding mechanisms.

Consequently, these policy interventions must by their very nature be seen as antithetical to the spirit ascendant in teacher/state relations for the past 30 years or more and long pursued by educationists prior to that. Most telling with regard to the present consideration, all three seek overtly to marginalise the influence of higher education in the initial training of teachers. So while the wholesale removal of initial teacher education to school-led contexts may impact favourably at school level in some senses (Berrill, 1992, 1993; Hargreaves, 1993), what is actually at stake is the unique interrelation of higher education and teacher education in this country and the fabric of the professionality that this interrelation has nurtured over several generations of teachers.

The significance of research into the licensed teacher scheme is that it illustrates at the very least the questionable nature of such moves. Even within the relatively small-scale numbers of the licensing scheme, few schools were found to be capable of offering high quality initial teacher education and less had the infrastructure in place to do so. Conse- quently, most licensing schools could not provide well-structured training for their licensed teachers. In addition the training and on-site support of mentors was wholly inadequate for the tasks that they were being asked to undertake (Office for Standards in Education [OFSTED], 1993; Barrett & Galvin, 1993). In short, the keystones of the licensing scheme were missing or fundamentally flawed.

In any rational analysis of policy and policy implementation this would give pause for thought. There are clearly issues of responsibility, direction and resourcing involved in such school-led initial teacher training which may or may not be resolvable. The experience of the licensing scheme suggests that these include the hidden costs of recruiting, course provision, training co-ordination, providing high calibre trainers for training days, training facility use and appropriate travel and cover for teachers in training and their mentors. More importantly they include issues of leadership, due process of training and evaluation~ and the unambigu- ous assignment of appropriate responsibilities of a11 parties involved with the process. Without these clear lines of accountability, purpose and commensurate resourcing--far in excess of that offered in support of licensing provision--the quality of teacher education in

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England and Wales may be seriously threa tened by the p roposed shift m school- led initial

teacher training. The polit ical agenda is to proceed regardlessly. Behind such a move the in tent ion mus t

therefore be wholly ideological. I t represents a polit ical s ta tement o f intent; 'a de te rmina t ion to change the way in which teachers teach ' (Miles & Midd le ton , 1993). I t also represents what Harr i s (1994) character ised as prole tar ianisat ion and offers confi rmat ion that teachers as a professional group are losing, in a single decade, mos t o f the professional advances o f the preceding century. At another level such intent ions warrant descr ipt ion as unacceptab le in t rus ion by the state into mat ters of academic judgement and so const i tute a direct challenge to academic freedom. As Russell (1992) and Grace (1988) have argued in different ways this presents p ro found dangers to meaningful democra t ic par t ic ipat ion. Such ideological wilful- ness in the face of moral imperat ives that have long insula ted academic endeavour from possession by the state, and despite contra- indicat ive research evidence on the wor th of the propos i t ion involved, may seem inconceivable. I t is, unfor tunate ly for all concerned, increas- ingly the experience of professions in the polit ical mil ieu of our times.

M a n y teacher educat ion inst i tut ions are likely to f ind it impossible to survive the coming dysfunction: the quest ion is whether teacher professionali ty can. So effective for so long as a surrogate to state endorsed professional s tanding, teacher professionali ty is now seriously challenged. W h a t is at risk is much more that just a teaching issue. Wi thou t their profession- ality to insulate teachers from poli t ic ised interference there is a very real danger that educat ion could be used for the overtly poli t ical ends of the state ra ther than the be t te rment

of its citizenry.

Correspondence: Conor Galvin, Universi ty of Cambr idge D e pa r tme n t of Educat ion , 17 T r u m p i n g t o n Street , Cambr idge CB2 1QA, UK) .

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