Whilst there has been a formal system for training teachers in the UK since the Education Elementary Act in 1870 made universal primary education
21
which tracks the shift in provision of ITE from mainly HEI based with a small proportion of school led providers such as School Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) where schools themselves organise and run teacher education, to that where many providers are competing for the same pre-
service teachers. Whilst there are different local schemes and different learning institutions, the approach by each training provider is broadly the same: pre- service teachers are placed in a work context, which could be a school or college, for on-the-job practice and receive academic input from an HEI partner for the post graduate element of the teaching course. This was, for a
considerably long part of the post-war era, the general approach to teacher education. Up until 2010, the Secretary of State for Education had a statutory duty to ensure that there were enough qualified teachers for the comprehensive provision of state schools and the local authorities had a central role in the statutory duty to provide education for all those within their area.
However, there has been a shift in the way education has been organised by successive recent governments which reflect ideological and political
positioning. Instead of the post-war consensus that there is direct state
responsibility for the delivery of education services such as teacher education, Ball says that from the 1979 Conservative government onwards, the
introduction of a ‘neo-liberal marketisation’ of education has outsourced the accountability from the state to individual providers (Ball, 2013). Instead of the state directly providing an accountable service to the public, it is now only indirectly accountable as it outsources the provision to multiple and competing providers. By having multiple providers of the same service and by quantifying aspects of education it is possible to create an ‘economy’ in which different providers compete to provide this education (for example, in the way of school league tables) and in doing so accept direct accountability in lieu of the state. However, rather than having an even and fairly distributed ‘comprehensive’ system, in this marketised educational context there are different providers who vie to be as selective as possible in order to achieve the ‘economy of student worth’ (Ball, 2013, p.3).
In terms of teacher education and teacher provision, the coalition government of 2010-15 introduced mainstream changes through The Academies Act 2010
22
which rapidly expanded the number of schools which were not obliged by law to hire qualified teachers. This was coupled with an openly declared shift in
marketisation of teacher education provision through the School Direct initiative. This initiative enabled schools to band together with a partner HEI and ‘bid’ for teacher training provider places. School Direct is a teacher training programme in which the places are allocated to schools who can then select their preferred provider-partner university as part of the pre-service teacher education
provision. School Direct was introduced in 2012 (DfE, 2012) with the aim of encouraging schools to offer teacher education provision in addition to local HEI, Teach First and SCITT schemes. School Direct pre-service teachers are recruited by ‘named’ school partners (in the application process, pre-service teachers apply to a named school). By 2014, the number of School Direct schools acting as providers either alone or in groups had risen rapidly to 9,786 schools (NCTL, 2014). In order to monitor standards there has to be a line of accountability and the government allocates this accountability to the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) who undertake inspections on the government’s behalf, which it has done since The Education Act 1994. Changes to the inspection framework have meant that this inspection reduces the quality of provision to that of a single grade overall: 1, 2, 3, or 4. Achievement of the inspection grade affects the ability of the provider to bid for teacher training places as set out by the National College of Teaching and Leadership (NCTL), “We will only allocate provider-led places to ITT providers graded “good” or “outstanding” for overall effectiveness by Ofsted” (NCTL, 2016, para. 17). This arrangement thus enables the provider to claim their accountability in the ‘economy of student worth’ and enter the market of pre- service teacher education.
There has also been a recent growth in Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) only courses to enable those who teach in local authority schools to do so without having to complete a PGCE course to obtain their QTS award. This could be through accessing school based training before entering an assessment only model (DfE, 2015) or simply by opting not to access the PGCE aspect of the teacher education offered by a provider such as that through The Times Educational Supplement (TES) ‘institute’ (https://www.tes.com/institute/) a
23
privately own company that runs partnerships between schools, trainee teachers and universities for profit.
Many other new teacher training schemes have also been launched or rapidly grown such as Teach First and SCITTs with the DfE setting out ‘school centred’ as the different feature of these schemes. This description is something of a misnomer as the reality is that all teacher training and teacher education is school centred in terms of the placement and indeed the QTS award mandates a minimum 120 days in school.
As set out before on p.21, HEI involvement in pre-service teacher education has been reduced nationally through the initiative School Direct, launched by the then Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove. The difference with School Direct is that the groups of pre-service teachers being trained by schools may be very small and isolated from other pre-service teachers of the same phase and subject. Allocations data from 2015-16 (DfE, 2014) analysed by the Times Educational Supplement (Ward, 2014) demonstrates that School Direct will now attract more of the pre-service teacher allocation than HEIs with 17,609 places for School Direct and 15,490 places for HEIs. The remaining 11,000 places are spread across Teach First, SCITTs and other small providers such as QTS self-assessment.
One of the issues regarding the creation of stable and healthy sized communities of pre-service teachers is the ability of providers to recruit to target. HEIs recruited to 90 percent of their target allocation whereas School Direct recruited to just 61 percent of their target for 2013-14 (DfE, 2014). Many providers were single or small groups of schools and would be offering low single figure numbers courses for potential applicants.
24
Figure 2.2 Allocation fill rate by route (allocated places filled by time of census, academic year 2014-15)
In particular, subjects that were difficult to fill such as physics, computer science and mathematics in which subject knowledge is acknowledged as a difficult barrier (many applicants come from a non-traditional subject background and either demonstrate associated knowledge such as through a statistics degree for mathematics, or they undertake a Subject Knowledge Enhancement course to qualify their entry) stood out for School Direct in terms of their ability to recruit pre-service teachers to these courses. From Figure 2.2 it is evident that pre- service teacher education model has expanded from HEIs, SCITTs and Teach First to include a large number of smaller providers through School Direct and this has a direct impact on the ability of pre-service teachers to operate as a community of practice with phase and subject specific pre-service teacher peers when they are on their teacher education course. The issues of pre- service teachers’ feelings of isolation within the various models are well known – pre-service teachers can become isolated and course completion can be challenging (Johnston, 2010) leading to poor retention (sometimes known as completion) on the course.
In their submissions to establish Teach First, the then Teaching and
Development Agency (TDA) provided records showing a completion rate of 86 percent from 2005-9 for PGCEs in Higher Education Institutions (Teach First, 2012). The data presented by the TDA was then used by the DfE as a reason to expand Teach First. Retention during pre-service training and retention in the profession are ongoing key issues for England and Wales and part of the
25
answer has been to dismantle the provision of largely HEI based pre-service teacher education.
Yet, the latest retention figures for Teach First (2015) demonstrate that retention in the profession is an issue for Teach First as well - set out in a parliamentary response to a Freedom of Information request (Gibb, 2015). In the UK, many teachers are leaving within the first five years of teaching and for Teach First, from 2010-15, a total of 1,956 teachers left within the first five years of their teaching life. Over the same period Teach First has recruited 4,845 teachers. It is too early to show how many of those will leave within the first five years, but certainly retention in the profession is an issue for all
providers - even Teach First. Figure 2.3, the National Audit Office’s 2016 report on teacher education demonstrated that retention is a key issue for teacher education in England and Wales and especially so for Teach First.
Figure 2.3 Retention percentages of Teach First trainees (National Audit Office, 2016)
As stated above, pre-service teacher education is currently undergoing a fundamental period of reform and indeed there are plans for futher reform. At the time of writing, the Secretary of State for Education has published a White
26
Paper for education, Education Excellence Everywhere (DfE, 2016) in which pre-service teacher education would undergo even further reform. With teacher education reform a contemporary agenda, this thesis is directly placed to inform the debate as to the way teacher educators can understand how pre-service teachers have harnessed private social media and techology to affect the way they learn through any community of practice that they are involved in when attaining their PGCE and QTS. Whilst it remains to be seen whether the White Paper will be taken to the next phase in its current form, in all likelihood,
teacher education faces an uncertain future.