In England, there has been a teacher recruitment and retention crisis for many years. In such a crisis, it is important that initial teacher education (ITE) providers are able to identify, recruit and educate 'high quality' applicants to join the teaching profession. In this study, we focused on two case studies of beginning teachers who were enrolled in a University-School ITE Partnership. By listening to these two novice teachers, and analysing their experiences against two frameworks of professional development (the professional learning continuum of Wilson & Demetriou (2007) and the characteristics of effective teachers identified by Korthagen & Wubbels (2001)), we explain how a synthesis of the frameworks could help ITE providers to select, monitor and assess beginning teachers' developmental trajectory when learning to teach.