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Over the last 10 years the system for training further education (FE) teachers in England has been the subject of almost continuous government reform. Following a critical Office for Standards in Education report in 2003, a new set of standards and associated regulations were introduced in 2006 by the then Labour Government to replace the earlier standards and regulations introduced by the Further Education National Training Organisation in 1999, which had had little time to bed down. The research reported in this article has been carried out with the support of the University Council for the Education of Teachers Post-16 Committee. Employing socio-cultural perspectives, it evaluates how the most recent regulatory regime is shaping trainees' learning and professional development. It explores how the 2006 standards, assessment units and regulations are influencing the curriculum offer, qualifications structure and pedagogical practice of teacher educators and trainees following courses run by university-led initial teacher training (ITT) partnerships in England. The broad finding is that despite a decade of reform, there is little evidence of the enriching of the experience of trainees on ITT courses that the government reforms envisaged. The fragmentation and impoverishment experienced by trainees learning to teach in the FE workplace remains a constant theme that the barrage of national standards, regulations and assessment units have done little to address. ContextIn contrast to initial teacher training (ITT) for schools, until the late 1990s the training of teachers in further and adult education (FE) in England 1 had been the subject of little regulation by government. This system was largely voluntarist with ITT dependent on the attitudes of college employers, and haphazard, reflecting the diverse nature of FE and the marginalisation of vocational and technical *Corresponding author.

Over the last few decades, governments of all political hues have introduced measures to regulate the development of the professional status of teachers in England. In the first part of the article, we compare and contrast how teachers from schools, colleges and universities are regulated by the state and the nature of the ITT qualifications and curricula that have been developed in response. We further explore the separate qualification tracks and pedagogical traditions that Bailey and Robson highlighted suggesting that the separate traditions of training school, college and HE teachers appear to be as strong as ever, as is a trend of ever-greater and more complex forms of regulation. In the second part of the article, we turn to a more theoretical examination of the state's attempt to professionalise teachers across the three sectors. We focus particularly on how national standards and the imposition of regulated forms of professional status are mediated by the workplace environments and historical traditions of the three sectors. Throughout, we attempt to evaluate the factors that help explain why the professionalisation of FE teachers has taken such contrasting forms to those of school and university teachers.

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