The commitment to establish a "school-led" system of teacher education in England, announced by the Coalition Government in 2011 and relentlessly pursued thereafter, represented a radical departure from previous kinds of initial teacher education partnership. While it is entirely consistent with a neoliberal agenda, with its strong…

We trace the recent development of the Oxford Education Deanery as an expansion of an initial teacher education partnership to include wider school-university collaboration in professional development, and in research. The current policy pressures in England are described on both school-university partnerships for initial teacher education, and on…

This paper reports on the introduction of a "clinical model" of teacher education at the University of Glasgow in 2011. The account is set against the backdrop of a review of major contemporary developments in teacher education. The common focus in this work is on such themes as the key function of the practicum, on "teaching…

This article provides an overview of the background and recent developments leading to the current reshaping of teacher education in Scotland, starting with the developments emanating in the past decade from the McCrone Report and finishing with the recent Donaldson Report, "Teaching Scotland's Future." It documents the key features of…

Background: Teacher education in Scotland has developed its own trajectory for many years and this distinctiveness appears to have increased since the creation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. Teachers' pay and conditions were addressed in 2001 by the agreement "A teaching profession for the 21st century." This agreement led to a…

The need for capacity-building in teacher education in the UK has been raised as a serious issue by a number of commentators. Tensions about the place of research in teacher education have persisted for many decades, but following changes to the core funding mechanisms in the UK, the maintenance of education research bases within many universities…

This article presents some of the Scottish findings of a comparative research project (2002-2004) which examined the ways initial teacher education (ITE) policy and practice take place in two of the four major components of the UK, England and Scotland. Debates about the nature of professional knowledge, where it resides and who owns it continue…

This article presents the conceptual and methodological framework of a two-year comparative research project (2002-2004), funded by the University of Paisley. The study, entitled "Convergence or Divergence? Initial Teacher Education in Scotland and England", investigated initial teacher education (ITE) policy and practice in England and…

In discussion of policy and practice on partnership between higher education providers and other stakeholders in initial teacher education (ITE), one significant approach has been to stress the desirability of developing models which are truly collaborative. This paper first discusses the "collaborative" model within a range of…

There is an apparent contradiction between the widespread moves towards a uniform and instrumentalist standards-based approach to teaching on the one hand and recent research-based insights into the complexity of effective pedagogies. The former tendency reflects a politically driven agenda, the latter is more professionally driven. Tensions…

The purpose of this research is to undertake a comparative analysis of policy and practice in initial teacher education (ITE) in two parts of the United Kingdom. Although the education systems of England and Scotland have been characterised as experiencing considerable autonomy since the Act of Union in 1707, the new context of political…