CONVERGENCE OR DIVERGENCE?
INITIAL TEACHER EDUCATION PRACTICE IN ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND.
Estelle Brisard, Ian Menter & Ian Smith
University of Paisley, Scotland.
Paper presented at the European Educational Research Conference, Hamburg, Germany, 17-20 September 2003.
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Abstract
Introduction
1- Rationale for a comparative study of England and Scotland’s initial teacher education policy and practice
1.1 The relevance of the Anglo-Scottish comparison in education
a) A new context for policy making in education and teacher education in the UK.
b) The potential contribution of ‘home internationals’ comparisons to educational research.
1-2 Comparative research in education in the age of globalisation
1-3 Globalisation & devolutionand the reinforcement of national identity and culture through education
2- Rationale for the comparative strategy and the specific methodological approach selected for this study
2-1 The research focus: convergence and divergence in Initial Teacher Education policy and practice in England and Scotland.
2-2- Rationale for the three strand-approach
a) The historical strand and the policy strand
b) The Practice strand
3- Methodological issues around the investigation of current practices in initial teacher education England and Scotland: the practice strand.
3-1 Multi-site case study comparative research: the importance of site selection
3-2 Towards a rich description of ITE practices: the complexity of the comparative object of research in the practice strand
a) The issue of the comparability of the providers observed
b)The issue of the comparability of the situations observed
3-3 The elusiveness of the research object
3-4: Where do we go from there? Lessons from the first stageof the research project.
a) National distinctiveness or structural and institutional influences?
b) The validity of the comparative agenda
c) Evidence of convergence and divergence
Conclusion
References
Abstract
This paper presents some methodological considerations on the first stage of an eighteen-month cross-national research project, currently in progress, and which compares initial teacher education (ITE) policy and practice in two of the four major components of the United Kingdom. It first outlines the comparative and conceptual framework for this study. It then goes on to present the rationale for the three-strand approach adopted for this study with particular reference to the general organisation of the fieldwork and the approaches to data collection and analysis adopted. Finally, the research team presents some preliminary findings and draws a few methodological lessons from the first stage of the research process.
Introduction
Although the education systems of England and Scotland have been characterised as experiencing considerable autonomy since the Act of Union in 1707, prior to the introduction of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 the prevailing political and economic context in the UK arguably resulted in similar policies being debated, and sometimes implemented, in the English and the Scottish initial teacher educational scene. Yet, the new context of political devolution in Scotland adds a sharper focus to comparative questions about the relationships between teacher education, the nation and the state. Using a comparative approach, the intention is as much to investigate for prevalent patterns, which transcend national specificity, as ‘to elucidate national uniqueness’ (Smyth et al, 2001). In this aim, this project adopts a societal, interpretative approach to cross-national research through which the researchers seek to carefully analyse intra-national as well as cross-national differences and similarities in the way initial teacher education policy and practice, as cultural processes, take place. The research method selected for this study is therefore exclusively qualitative and the project comprises three strands, which will provide three complementary and meaningful perspectives on the object of study. The first and second strands respectively examine the parallel historical development of ITE and the organisation and governance of ITE in each country. The last strand aims to provide a rich account of current initial teacher education practices in England and Scotland.
1- Rationale for a comparative study of England and Scotland’s initial teacher education policy and practice
1.1 The relevance of the Anglo-Scottish comparison in education
a) A new context for policy making in education and teacher education in the UK.
The establishment of the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Executive in 1999 constitutes a significant constitutional change in the relationship between England and Scotland, since the creation of the British State by the Treaty of Union in 1707. Prior to the devolution of powers from Westminster to the Scottish parliament, Scottish education policy was determined within the Scottish Office. The Secretary of State for Scotland was responsible for developing policy although, in practice, education was usually the day to day responsibility of one of the ministers within the Office. The pattern of policy development and implementation which emerged was therefore distinctive and could somewhat simplistically be described in the following way: the UK Government would develop policy for England, and would expect to see these developments mirrored in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland (Paterson: 2003). Raffe (1998) qualified the pattern of policy-making prior to devolution in the UK, as a mixture of leadership (where England was the main leader), autonomous policy-making (to pursue domestic agendas) and reactive policy-making (whether to delay, accept, adapt or reject initiatives originating in Westminster). Following devolution, the Scottish Executive is now directly responsible for a number of devolved matters such as education, health and the law among others. Likewise, the UK Parliament at Westminster has devolved powers to the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. It has done so also to the Welsh Assembly and to the Northern Ireland Assembly. Scotland, however, is the only component of the UK to have its own parliament. As such, a group of UK researchers, currently working on an Anglo-Scottish comparative project[1] argue that
if dramatic constitutional changes occur in the next five years, they are likely to do so in Scotland. Changes in England are more likely to be affected by what is happening in Scotland than in other parts of the UK. What happens in Scotland is also likely to have much greater bearing on further constitutional change in these islands than what happens in Wales or Northern Ireland.
b) The potential contribution of ‘home internationals’ comparisons to educational research.
Raffe et al (1999) have eloquently argued for the value and feasibility of undertaking comparative research into what they call ‘home internationals,’ that is the four components of the UK: England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Among other reasons given by the authors, the four components particular comparative potential arises from their historical constitutional interdependence which brings about a meaningful balance of similarities and differences in the way education policy was made and implemented, at least until devolution. Yet, they acknowledge that ‘differences vary according to the territories concerned, [with] England and Wales [being] the most similar and Scotland the most different’ (p 17). Right up to 1997 it was generally the case that Westminster policies were followed through very closely in Wales and Northern Ireland, although often with specialised additions such as the establishment of Welsh in the curriculum, Welsh medium teaching in some schools, or the introduction of a curriculum theme ‘education for mutual understanding’ in Northern Ireland and other variations on the ‘follow-my-leader’ principle (Raffe et al 1999: 10). In Scotland on the other hand, there was often considerable resistance to the adoption of Westminster derived policies which would lead to major adaptations and occasionally complete rejection. Two recent examples of this would be the very different approach taken to curriculum and assessment and the very small take-up of formal self-government of schools. In the former case, where England imposed a tightly structured and prescribed curriculum structure and content, the National Curriculum, with formal assessment at 7, 11, 14 and 16, Scotland developed a framework of curriculum guidance, the ‘5-14 curriculum’, with arrangements for assessment which gave much more scope to teacher involvement until the stage of public examinations. On the question of school government, in England, hundreds of schools ‘opted out’ of LEA control. Contrastingly, in Scotland schools were able to apply for self-government but only two schools applied for this status.
Explanations for this deviation from the direction of the UK government can be developed either by taking an historical view or by looking at the particular period of Conservative administrations in the 1980s and early 1990s. From the longer term viewpoint, it is commonplace in histories of Scotland to assert that there were three key pillars of Scottish society which retained a strong degree of independence and related to a strongly differentiated national identity since 1707. These were the church, the law and education. Not only was there separate development of the institutions associated with each of these key areas of civic life, but in each of these the relevant professions developed their own codes, practices and specifically training and education. The universities and colleges of Scotland played a key part in developing training and education for clergy, lawyers and teachers. The provisions for law and religion were indeed the cornerstones of the development of the Scottish university system, which has been recognised as playing such a major role in the development of Britain and indeed the wider world (see Herman 2001, Davie 1961, Anderson 1997). The responsibility for the training of teachers was initially taken on by the churches (as in England) but in the twentieth century became increasingly secularised through the establishment of Colleges of Education. However, by very early into the twenty first century, all initial teacher education in Scotland was provided by seven universities, following a series of mergers (Marker, 2000).
Alongside Raffe et al, one could claim that there is a need for more knowledge of the policy-making process and the relationship between policy and practice, between and within each of the UK components, which may help us further our understanding of the previously mentioned pattern of convergence and divergence between England and Scotland for instance. A principal advantage of UK-wide studies of education systems, and one which is noted by Raffe (1998), is first of all to promote generally a better knowledge and informed understanding of the similarities and differences within the systems, which are still too often wrongly amalgamated to the English education system only. Another important benefit of such comparative studies is to illuminate current common issues and tensions within specific areas of education and training, and highlight a number of alternative ways in which the four components approach these issues, what these authors call ‘variations upon common themes’ (p18). A number of national studies exist on the educational history and institutions of each UK nation, some of which being indirectly comparative, since the identification of distinctive features in the Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish systems necessarily implies an implicit comparison with England. McPherson and Raab (1988) and Humes (1986) for instance have respectively studied the way in which a strong Scottish education policy coterie developed. These studies demonstrate in different ways the close connections between the universities, the education civil servants, education authority managers, members of the education inspectorate (HMI), teacher unions and headteachers. In this small country, many key actors have known each other for a considerable time, from school through university and into their respective occupations. A strong sense of common understanding has developed – what McPherson and Raab call an assumptive community – which some Secretaries of State and their education ministers have found difficult to break into.
The apparent divergence of approaches to teacher education between England and Scotland is best demonstrated in the period 1979-1997 as will be shown later, and may or may not become even greater under the devolution regime. As such, it is one of the main interests of the project on which this paper is based. We believe that the comparative approach provides us with a suitable method to investigate the question of the relationship between teacher education, the nation and the state and to contribute to theoretical understanding in this area. Indeed, the study may perhaps be seen as an investigation of the search which Furlong et al call for, following their study of initial teacher training in England:
Are state control and market forces or professional self-governance really the only models of accountability available to us – or can we develop new approaches to teacher professionalism, based upon more participatory relationships with diverse communities? (2000: 175)
1-2 Comparative research in education in the age of globalisation
At the same time as some point out a divergent trend in educational policy among the four UK education systems (Raffe et al, 1999) there has been a growing literature in education policy studies about the convergence of education policies and practices, and this is frequently associated with the thesis of globalisation (Adick, 2002; Arnove & Torres, 1999; Green, 2002; Lawn, 2002). Globalisation has been defined as ‘the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’ (Arnove, 1999: 2). Cross-national convergence in educational policy and a standardisation agenda have been stimulated by supranational organisations acting in the field of education (Adick, 2002; Arnove, 1999). In initial teacher education specifically, Schnaitmann (1998) accounts for a trend of international convergence since the 1990s by the fact that around the world, technocratic rationality and technicism in teacher education programmes have been denounced and in the face of this criticism, teacher educators have attempted ‘to find a new way to integrate harmoniously the critical, the academic and the professional components of a teacher education programme’ designed to prepare teachers to become critical intellectuals (p.156). In the case of initial teacher education in Scotland and initial teacher training (ITT)in England, there are features of recent developments which on the face of it seem to be very similar. Perhaps the best two examples of this are the development of competence standards for entry into the profession and the formal acknowledgement of the significant role of schools in the process, usually signified through the use of the term ‘partnership’. Such developments are not uncommon around the rest of the ‘developed’ world, especially the development of competence standards which are a response to a perceived need, in the 1980s and 1990s, both in North America and Europe, to control the quality of performance of teachers and educational systems (Ryba, 1992; Merryfield, 1994; Mahony & Hextall, 2001). On the other hand, what may seem surprising, is the apparent persistence of divergence within this context. For Arnove however, common prescriptions by international agencies, in the field of education, and global forces ‘are not uniformly implemented or unquestionably received’ (1999: 2). This reflects the complexity of the interplay between the global, the regional and the local, especially in matters of educational policy, being the one area over which nation-states still retain some degree of control. Yet, whilst a trend towards convergence has been promoted by the European Commission and OECD policies, systems of teacher education in Europe remain of ‘ahighly heterogeneous nature’ (Buchberger et al, 2000: 12). Likewise, globalisation, Green argues, does ‘alter the prospects for traditional education systems’ with new global policy rhetorics emerging (he cites lifelong learning), but he agrees that education systems are not converging on a single model (2002: 14). This argument is corroborated by Gauthier (2002) with regards more specifically to initial teacher education in Europe, where despite a convergence in the nature of the challenges in this domain, solutions nevertheless remain specific and in keeping with the cultural tradition of education of the host country. The weakening of the nation-state, as a policy space with definable boundaries, has prompted some to ask the question of whether it remains an appropriate unit of comparison in comparative education research (Adick, 2000; Beck 2000).
1-3 Globalisation & devolutionand the reinforcement of national identity and culture through education
Far from making cross-national research irrelevant or meaningless, it is our belief that the complex system of influence generated by macro phenomena -such as devolution, the consolidation of the European space and globalisation- on nation-states, provides a particularly rich setting for research into the relationship between the state, the nation and education and the teaching profession. This argument appears to be supported by the growing number of UK-wide comparative education studies, in addition to our own (Brisard 2002 a; Croxford 2001 a,b; Menter 2001, 2002; Phillips 2000; Raffe 2000; Raffe et al 2001; Teelken C. 2000).
Within Europe, education remains one of the institutions over which nation-states still retain a degree of decision making. It is all the more important in a double context of globalisation and devolution in Scotland, where, as noted earlier, education is seen as one of the famous three pillars of Scottish identity. The transmission through education of a nation’s cultural heritage assures an essential cohesion and a sense of community among its people. Therefore to some extent, the education system is a key part of the ‘nation building’ which is going on in Scotland. Green (2002, 4-5) has argued this case on a wider front:
National education was a massive engine of integration, assimilating the local to the national and the particular to the general. In short, it created, or tried to create, the civic identity and national consciousness which would bind each to the state and reconcile each to the other, making actual citizens out of those who were deemed such in law…….
If the way in which national education systems in democratic countries have developed demonstrates the outcome of struggles between various interest groups within each nation (Williams, 1960), then policies and practices relating to the preparation of teachers for those national systems may be one of the clearest indicators within a society of the values which are dominant and of the forms of social organisation and citizenship which the dominant members of society wish to create. These are still early days for the Scottish Parliament, but education is likely to be one of the key tests for its success as a democratic institution. As Paterson (2000: 9) has put it, in the working out of tensions and conflicts between the elected body and civic society, ‘education over the next few decades will… provide a test-case of civil society’s role in democratic renewal’. Whether Scotland can or cannot be defined as a nation state, nevertheless there is a considerable concern further to develop a distinctive national identity. This concern is perhaps best described by the researchers currently involved in the Nations and Regions Research Programme(op. cit.) based in Edinburgh: