This article reports on an investigation into the motivations of a cohort of pre-service teacher education students, undertaking a five-year, full-time combined undergraduate and initial teacher education degree program at the University of Sydney, Australia. Participants completed an extensive questionnaire which sought to gather data on the characteristics of the cohort; the factors that influenced their decision to undertake a teaching degree; their educational and work backgrounds; their perceptions of teaching, teachers and students; their expectations of teaching as a career; and their professional goals. The study found that a majority of participants made the decision to teach based on reasons that reflect personal aspirations to work with young people to make a difference in their lives; to maintain a meaningful engagement with the subject area they were drawn to; and to attain personal fulfilment and meaning. The study found that more than two-thirds of the sample intended teaching for at least 10 years after being appointed. The article explores the implications of the findings for early career teacher satisfaction, teacher retention and early career teacher attrition.

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Resonant continuities: The influence of the Newbolt Report on the formation of English curriculum in New South Wales, Australia"Retrieving intellectual history is not an antiquarian pursuit. Anyone wanting to be a well informed professional needs to understand certain continuities that link English curriculum discourses and practices with previous discourses and practices " (Reid 2003, 100).Even this short excerpt is inscribed with certain "epistemic assumptions" (Reid 1996, 32) about the student, the teacher, and the superior civilising and character-building utility of literature and literary study that would come to figure so prominently in the Newbolt Report. The philosophical, ideological and discursive correspondences between the Newbolt Report and a range of other key education reports, policies, documents, Acts and syllabuses in Australia and Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been recognised in the

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