The trend towards giving British secondary schools a fuller role in initial teacher education (ITE) has been gathering pace for much of the second half of this century. The impetuses driving this development have been partly professional and partly political. However, a recent political initiative (Circular 9/92, Department for Education, 1992) precipitated the development of school‐based ITE beyond what the professional evidence supported. This paper examines teachers’ perceptions of the costs and benefits to schools of involvement in school‐based ITE, as instituted by Circular 9/92, distinguishing between tangible and intangible costs and benefits. It is based on a survey of schools from throughout England and Wales. Four groups of teachers with different levels of involvement and managerial responsibility were sampled. The paper also explores teachers’ perceptions of the relationship between costs and benefits before offering some concluding speculations on the future of school‐based ITE.

Successive governments in England have regarded classroom observation as an essential tool for monitoring and improving teacher performance. Despite its importance in national policy for teacher development, the impact of classroom observation on individual teachers, and on improving quality and standards in teaching and learning, remain under-researched areas. Further education (FE) in general, and FE teachers in particular, have received sparse attention. This paper adopts a theoretical framework grounded in aspects of assessment theory to explore some of the consequences of using observation to assess, monitor and raise standards of classroom performance in the FE workforce. It draws on findings from a mixed-methods study, involving questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, conducted in 10 FE colleges situated across the West Midlands region of England. The paper concludes by situating the findings against the broader backdrop of research into teachers’ continuing professional development and, in so doing, raises questions about the fitness for purpose of prevailing observation assessment regimes in FE and the extent to which these systems are able to achieve their purported goals

Although school-based initial teacher training (ITT) has been studied extensively, little attention has been paid to the subject of this paper: its impact on pupils. The ® ndings reported here are part of a larger investigation into the costs and bene® ts of ITT in secondary schools. This paper explores the implications of school-based ITT for pupils from the perspective of four groups of teachers: two groups with formal mentoring responsibilities; class teachers with no designated role in the mentoring processes and headteachers. Their views on matters such as effects on pupil discipline, pupil motivation, curriculum continuity and parental perceptions of a school are examined. Received wisdom on some of these topics is cast in an unexpected light by the results reported here.

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