From fragmentation to chaos? The regulation of initial teacher training in further education

Abstract

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.

Higher education in further education: capturing and promoting HEness

“…So deep is the permeation it is now also difficult to consider that the two sets of professional standards for new teachers (Lifelong Learning UK's for FE lecturers, and the Higher Education Academy [HEA]-housed UK Professional Standards Framework for HE lecturers -UK PSF) are actually preparing people to undertake the same type of work. The former have been described as micro-prescriptive, generic standards requiring compliance and the latter as a framework for standards which each university is able to interpret, thereby maintaining its autonomy in preparing new staff for academic life (Nasta 2007;Lea 2010;Lucas, Nasta, and Rogers 2011). And because of this, the two systems could be argued to prepare people perfectly for either a managerial or more collegial culture.…”

A comparative study of awarding organisation and HEI initial teacher training programmes for the lifelong learning sector in England

“…Teacher training for the lifelong learning sector has undergone a series of radical changes since the end of the 1990s, and providers are now entering an environment of unprecedented uncertainty (Lucas et al 2012). For HEIs in particular the combination of increased competition, steeply rising that most of those undertaking the Cert Ed/PGCE do so because of the prestige university qualifications are believed to offer, and the labour market advantage conferred by these qualifications.…”

Professional standards in teacher education: tracing discourses of professionalism through the analysis of textbooks

“…The data and analysis presented above, based on three core textbooks that can be seen as to some degree representing the core knowledge of the LLS curriculum, would seem to suggest that they do accomplish something, but perhaps not very much. The content of Reece and Walker remains almost unchanged across all six editions, with one exception: the imposition of the FEnto standards might be seen to have informed the deletion of one chapter from Reece and Walker ('the role of the teacher in context'), a concrete example of the kind of narrowing of the curriculum that has often been posited as an effect of the standards (Lucas et al, 2012). At the same time, the ease with which the LLUK standards were substituted for the FEnto standards between the 5 th and 6 th editions of Reece and Walker, with relatively little changes to the content of the curriculum, might suggest that the LLS curriculum is in fact robust and well-defined, capable of absorbing subsequent sets of professional standards rather than being absorbed or distorted by them.…”

“…These standards were accompanied by a further element: a new process of professional formation that required teachers in the LLS sector to achieve a new professional status -Qualified Teacher, Learning and Skills (QTLS) -following a compulsory period of continuing professional development (CPD). But criticism remained: from university researchers, who argued that the new standards were still mechanistic, overly prescriptive and narrowed the content of teacher education curricula (Lucas et al, 2012), and from policy makers who allowed the standards to ossify firstly by abolishing LLUK and secondly by removing financial support from the Institute for Learning (the professional body for LLS teachers that, amongst other things, was responsible for auditing teachers' CPD and QTLS endorsement) and which at the time of writing has announced that it is ceasing operation, and thirdly by reintroducing voluntarism into LLS teacher education. And although the QTLS process of professional formation has survived, the management of the process has been passed from the IfL (ostensibly a member-led organisation) to the Education and Training Foundation (very much an employer-led organisation).…”

“…Professional qualifications for teachers in the LLS are by no means new, although they have for much of their history been voluntary, highly variable in terms of both curriculum and assessment, and differing in academic level (Lucas et al, 2012). Professional standards are a more recent arrival.…”