Move over Nelly: lessons from 30 years of employment-based initial teacher education in England

Recruiting, preparing and retaining high-quality teachers are recurrent themes of local, national and international education agendas. Traditional university-led forms of teacher education continue to be challenged, and defended, as nations strive to secure a teaching force equipped to achieve high-quality learning outcomes for all students. One commonly adopted policy solution has been the diversification of teacher preparation routes: the alternative certification agenda. In this article, we examine the entire history of one alternative route in place in England from 1997 to 2012, the Graduate Teacher Programme. Using one example of an employment-based programme, we argue that opportunities to engineer innovative and creative spaces in the face of the current teacher preparation reform agenda need to be seized. This case study, which is contextualised in both the international debates about alternative teacher certification routes and the current policy agenda in England, demonstrates the extent to which successive administrations have failed to learn from the lessons of the past in the rush to recycle policies and claim them as their own

Revolution from above in English schools: neoliberalism, the democratic commons and education

The ideas of the New Left and the recently emerged alter-globalisation movements are marginal within current policy debates concerning the English education system. Here I seek to demonstrate the interconnections between the New Left and the alter-globalisation movement and suggest that these ideas contain a powerful corrective to the increasingly authoritarian present. The next part of the article considers the development of neoliberalism both in a theoretical context and since the arrival of the new Conservative–Liberal government in the UK. Here I outline the rapid transformation of English schools under the academies programme and look at how it has been explicitly linked to ideas of ‘moral collapse’ evident in the popular discourse of ‘Broken Britain’. Especially significant in this respect has been the labelling of comprehensive schools as ‘failures’ and the explicit imposition of more authoritarian understandings of pedagogy. I seek to explore both the rapidity of this transformation in the context of the dissatisfaction with the idea of comprehensive schools shown by the political Right and the Third Way’s reworking of socialism. Finally I briefly consider more progressive alternatives for schools and education by returning to the idea of the democratic commons. In this respect, the cultural Left needs to explore more radical alternatives beyond the defence of comprehensive schooling which sounds both nostalgic and misplaced within our global times

Teaching other people’s children, elsewhere, for a while: the rhetoric of a travelling educational reform

Teach for All is a good example of a globally travelling educational reform policy. In this article, we examine the rhetoric of the reform through an analysis of its public discourse, specifically the websites for the umbrella organization, 3 of its 35 constituent projects (Teach for America, Teach First and Teach for China) and one associated project (Teach First Norway). The analysis focuses on the rhetorical production of teaching as something done to other people’s children, in places apart from and outside the communities and schools of dominant populations, and for a while only – as a short-term mission rather than what is usually understood as a professional career. We argue that the principal motive underlying Teach for All’s rhetoric is the cultivation of a cadre of leaders and a form of neoliberal social entrepreneurship that it claims will solve the problem of ‘broken’ societies, public services and, specifically, schools.This work was supported by the British Academy