Datos de identificación de microorganismos y de su

Following a consultation period of just over a year, LLUK revealed their professional standards for teachers, tutors and trainers in the lifelong learning sector (LLUK, 2007) as discussed in the previous subchapter. Taken in conjunction with the introduction of a

professional body for the teachers in the sector (the IfL), a professional status for teachers in the sector (QTLS), and a framework of professional development and necessity to evidence continued professional standing amongst the workforce, that these standards would play a significant part in the “desire to professionalise a disparate workforce” (Simmons & Walker, 2013) and “create a national system for further education ITT qualifications comparable to

that operating in the schools sector” (Lucas et al., 2012: 679). The standards introduced were

based around six core professional areas, known as overarching professional standards, and related to the following areas:

• Professional values and practice; • Learning and teaching;

• Specialist learning and teaching; • Planning for learning;

• Assessment for learning;

Each of these areas were split into three subsections, containing statements of compliance around the areas of professional values (a series of value statements that ITT graduates hold),

professional knowledge and understanding (a series of statements stating what teachers

should know and understand), and professional practice (an exemplification of what teachers should pragmatically do in their roles). In total, there were 191 statements, spread throughout the six overarching professional standards and their constituent subsections.

Even during the consultation phase, the depth and breadth of the proposed standards, indeed even the very necessity for standards came under scrutiny. Nasta discussed the ethos of the requirement, and the futility of trying to codify such a complex profession as teaching, suggesting that such attempts:

often take the form of complex and elaborate specifications. The 1999 FENTO

standards and the 2006 draft LLUK standards that will eventually replace them are no exceptions. Both sets of standards make an implicit assumption that it is possible to capture in written statements—codified knowledge—the richness and complexities involved in the process of teaching.

(Nasta, 2007: 3) Eraut is sympathetic to this argument, suggesting that whilst technical knowledge can be appropriately codified, practical knowledge cannot. He likens (like Schön) teaching to a ‘hot’ environment, where decisions must be instantaneous and intuitive (unlike, he argues, ‘cool’ managerial environments where there is a greater place for reflection, and taking time in decision making), and therefore argues that the very principle of reducing teacher professional action to a codified set of behavioural statements is extremely problematic (Eraut, 1994). Avis et al. (2012) add to this discussion by contrasting the training of teachers of vocational education and training in England and Scotland, noting key differences between the two, including:

• the nature of Scottish guidelines for teacher training content in their TQFE (Teaching Qualification in Further Education) programmes, dichotomic with the standards driven framework of England; and of key relevance to my research findings: • the purely pedagogic model of the Scottish system, dichotomic with the English

Interestingly, Carr and Skinner, although discussing the education system as a whole, rather than post-compulsory in isolation, make reference to one further dichotomisation between English and Scottish teacher education, suggesting that the anti-teacher discourse of derision is less prevalent in Scottish society than in English society (2009). They are critical of the technicism of standards-based systems in teacher education, and as an alternative discuss the promotion of virtue and morality as key elements of teacher professionalism, promoting in particular the thoughts of Aristotle on deontic (following obligation), aretaic (following virtue), and technical dimensions of skill and self.

Maxwell (2010) contributes a critical discussion on the appropriateness of the reforms, citing both epistemological and contextual vagaries in both the ethos, and the enactment of the standards. She too refers fittingly back to Nasta, who summarises this debate succinctly when he suggests that “teachers ‘know’ and ‘do’ much more than they can say or can be written in

sets of written standards. Their knowledge and performance is in many respects unique and dependent upon the contexts in which they work” (2007: 4). Lucas et al. (2012) both draw

upon and reiterate the earlier work of Nasta in questioning the extent to which it is even possible to condense the complexity of teaching into a series of written statements, but suggest following their own primary research across a variety of universities providing post- compulsory ITT that there were still significant differences in content, approach and

assessment in the pedagogy of ITT. I had to take this factor into consideration when

undertaking my primary research, as I purposefully included participants from two different awarding universities, in order to ensure that any findings presented were not simply as a result of a particular university’s approach to ITT. This in turn made the selection of phenomenography as an approach to research particularly appropriate, as it placed the experiences of the individual former trainee as paramount to the process, irrespective of which university they had attended. The words of Hyland resonate with the literature in this area when discussing the imposition of such standards on a humanist field such as education:

[u]nderpinning such implications is a reductionist view of human agency which assumes that knowledge, skills and values can be codified in terms of lists of competence statements and measured objectively in abstraction from everyday experience. This leads to an excessively instrumentalist conception of knowledge and skills.

To provide a perspective from compulsory education, Blake and Lansdell (2000) argue that the current standards for teacher training in schools are largely irrelevant, and that success (or failure) in becoming a ‘good’ teacher is derived from the “conditions of learning established

in particular teacher education programmes” (2000: 64) – in essence that trainees learn to

become successful teachers despite the national standards set for them, rather than because of them. Although their research is based entirely within the compulsory sector, the parallels between their paper and the focus (within post-compulsory teacher training) of my research ensured that the findings of Blake and Lansdell were key in the preparation phase of this research.