When, in 2022, I planned a book on the crisis in teacher education in England, I thought it would be a niche book, directly relevant to the English education policy scene and more indirectly relevant to teacher education policy researchers internationally. Bloomsbury, thankfully, could see there would be a market for such a book and my co-authors and I worked at pace to produce the manuscript and get it peer reviewed. Then Bloomsbury themselves pulled out all the stops to the get the open access e-book out in time for this year’s BERA conference. Teacher Education in Crisis: The State, the Market and the Universities is published on Tuesday. Bravo Bloomsbury!
The principal audiences for the book were to be (and still are): 1. Teachers in England who, justifiably facing their own crises, likely did not know what was going on in the system that had produced them and that, according to multiple sources of evidence, regarded the system highly; 2. Education policy researchers internationally (particularly those with a focus on teacher education policy), because what has gone on in England is unique both in terms of the nature of its intent, its rhetoric, and its mode of enactment; 3. Higher education leaders in England and elsewhere – because my co-authors and I did not believe that Vice-Chancellors fully understood what was happening to their universities – or at least one corner of them.
While there has always partly been motive for us to provide a ‘warning to the curious’, the book now seems much more relevant to Australia in that respect. That’s not to say that Australia will see a carbon copy of the English reforms since 2019, of course, but some of the tools of reform, including the rhetoric, are very similar.
We know that during the first stage of the current Australian reforms (the ‘Quality Initial Teacher Education Review’) under Liberal-National Education Minister Alan Tudge – that then became an ‘Expert Panel’ under Australian Labor Minister Jason Clare – the Australian ‘expert panel’ spoke to the ‘expert group’ that stood behind the English ‘Market Review’ accreditation reforms and the English ‘Core Content Framework’. The common thread between both QITE and The Teacher Education Expert Panel was the chair, University of Sydney VC Mark Scott. It seems, from the final report (Strong Beginnings), that Mark Scott wanted to take ideas from the English reforms (and pretty much only from England) as well as please his Minister(s).
The peculiarities of England as a political jurisdiction – and the fact that a federation of states constitute Australia – made it much easier for Boris Johnson’s government to do what they did to the universities in England than it would be for Anthony Albanese’s government to do to the universities in Australia. But there is one area where the Australian response to the old Empire’s ideas is likely to be more competent, at least, than the current government in England (not that that is difficult) and therefore potentially more concerning.
In the ‘Market Review’ accreditation process in England, all of the activity took place within the Ministry (Department) of Education in London (the DfE). All of the applications for accreditation and then all the accredited universities’ reading lists and PowerPoint slides, etc. were reviewed within the DfE. Since 2010, the English government has been busy abolishing all public bodies and quasi-autonomous agencies so that there is only one ‘source of truth’ and authority within the English education state. The book goes over some of the ground as to why that happened.
In the Australian setting, the government has proposed setting up a statutory public body that will have accreditation powers across Australia and to which, presumably, all of the states and territories regulatory bodies will be secondary. The accreditation process will be managed by this quasi-autonomous agency that will be staffed by, presumably, Australian public servants.
Arguments for and against Strong Beginnings‘ proposals aside, establishing a federal public body to run accreditation at arms’ length from the Minister of the day and their mates is likely to make it more competent than the English hot mess in terms of efficiently delivering the policy. But the risks to such an approach are that this reach for control, across states and territories, is institutionalized and the agency becomes part of an already large federal bureaucracy. The setting up of an Australian ITE accreditation agency also institutionalizes the assumption that central government determines the curriculum for all universities’ programs and units (at least as far as ITE goes, for the moment) – a significant advance on the current situation with the teacher regulatory bodies in states and territories.
Something else of relevance to Australia is the argument in Jo-Anne Baird’s chapter in the book that Heads of Schools of Education in England were either caught napping or just didn’t realize how strongly the government would push changes through. Baird was the Director of the Oxford Department of Education at the time and, in her chapter, speculates whether things would have been any different if Heads of Education had pushed back harder in the initial stages of the reforms. One thing is certain in England, leadership on initial teacher education in universities has been weak – too often, some Heads of Schools of Education have been disinterested in teacher education (even though they have been glad of the revenue), relegating their teacher educators to teaching-only positions. And the sector representative body (the Universities Council for the Education of Teachers) had been passive for many years, even joining in and putting their Executive Director’s name to some the government’s activities (such as the Core Content Framework) before they finally understood what was happening, as they looked on aghast.
So, for Australian readers, Teacher Education in Crisis is published Open Access (i.e. free) as an e-book on 12 September and for sale in paperback and hardback in December 2023. In some ways it’s sad to be recommending a book to people because it will give them examples of what not to do or things to be vigilant about. But at least, as an e-book, it’s free.
Viv Ellis 