Last week the House of Lords had a short debate on Initial Teacher Training. Initial Teacher Training – Hansard – UK Parliament This is an important subject that doesn’t receive enough attention. Each year the government in England trains more teachers than the total workforce of The Royal Navy and schools recruit possibly around 40,000 teachers each year including those moving between schools as well as new entrants and re-entrants.

The government has conducted what it has termed a Market Review into ITT or Initial Teacher Education as many would prefer to call it. ITT Market Review: more thoughts | John Howson (wordpress.com) Personally, I prefer the more neutral Teacher Preparation Programme (TPP) for the experience, but it is a matter of taste and semantics.

The debate in the Upper House included contributions from a former Labour secretary of State along with many other knowledgeable Peers from all sides of the House. There is concern amongst some universities including both Oxford and Cambridge about the degree of government control over the TPP curriculum and the role of the civil service. Last time government took a detailed interest in the functioning of TPP courses there was at least a Quango in the form of Teacher Training Agency that had some credibility with the teachers and academics providing the preparation programmes. Those with especially long memories will recall that I worked for the TTA for nearly a year over the change from the Major to the Blair governments in 1996-1997.

As lord Storey said in the debate “In the last decade,… there has been a steady growth of different routes into teaching, and ITT has become very fragmented. Teaching is now pretty much a graduate profession, with most teachers getting their degree before deciding which route to take. In addition to the traditional degree plus PGCE route, the balance has swung very much towards school-based initial teacher training. The traditional years spent at university, with a placement in a school for an extended teaching practice, has been replaced for many students with a year based in a school, with the school buying in the pedagogical element from a university.”

Then, there is Teach First, Teach Next, Troops to Teachers and on the horizon the iQTS discussed in the previous post on this blog.

The DfE has taken control of the admissions process alongside the certification of providers, so perhaps as the main employer of teachers it us understandable that it would want to be involved with the curriculum.

However, it does seem less than sensible to risk the meltdown of a system that handles such large numbers of would-be teachers relatively economically at a time when central government is looking to make economies. Do we want to go back to a time when the Russsell Group universities train teachers for the private sector schools both at home and overseas in parallel to a government scheme for training teachers for the state school sector?

If you are interested in the subject do read the excellent contributions to the debate using the link at the top of this post.