‘Teaching is not a lost art but the regard for it is a lost tradition.’ (Barzun, 1954, p. 12)
As it was then for Jacques Barzun, so it is now for the state of teaching in England. How we teach our teachers is vital in maintaining the status and quality of the profession; however, much of the global policy discourse on teacher careers has centred around pay and working conditions when in employment (Chimier & Tournier, 2019). In this blog post, I argue that the quality of initial teacher education (ITE) is the glaring omission that has detrimentally impacted our teachers but has not been widely discussed.
Since the late twentieth-century market-based reforms spearheaded by the UK and the US, the administration of ITE has been increasingly shaped towards teaching as a short technical craft that prioritises ‘on-the-job’ learning (Winch, 2017). This has paved the way for an occupation that has since been fragmented, prescriptive and reduced to a form of content delivery with no regard for pedagogical understanding, professional judgment or autonomy (Maguire, 2014). A prime example in England is the government’s push to make teacher education a predominantly school-led system through its controversial re-accreditation process and early career framework, which has been criticised by junior teachers for its low value and adding to an already high workload (Allen, 2023).
Moreover, the English system’s myriad routes into teaching have caused confusion for prospective educators (NAO, 2016) and reduced research-based inquiry through its apprentice-based provision. This neoliberal policy trend of increasing choice and marketising teacher education has been closely aligned by academics to the Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM) and its associated symptoms of increased accountability, competition and standardisation within education systems (Sahlberg, 2012). Consequently, teachers enter the classroom insufficiently prepared to deal with the growing complex and diverse needs of their students under such a restrictive model (Winch et al., 2015). This leaves the profession in a precarious and dangerous position with the sidelining of its philosophical, psychological and sociological underpinnings.
