School-University Partnerships in Initial Teacher Education in Scotland: Conceptions, Expectations and Aspirations of Practitioners and Policy-makers.

Authors

Estelle Brisard, University of Paisley

Ian Menter, University of Glasgow

Ian Smith. University of Paisley

Paper delivered at the British Educational Research Association Conference, September 2004, Manchester.

DRAFT PAPER: PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE WITHOUT PERMISSION

Contact:

Estelle Brisard

School of Education

University of Paisley

University Campus Ayr

Beech Grove

Ayr KA8 0SR

Tel: 01292 886471

E-mail:
1. Introduction

1.1Partnership in Initial Teacher Education

There is no doubt that the relationships between stakeholders in the processes of initial teacher education are widely perceived as being critical to the successful achievement of the intended outcomes. In our recent systematic review of practices in the UK, Europe, Australasia and the USA (Brisard et al 2004), we found persuasive evidence that ‘partnership’ is seen as the key to the pre-service preparation of teachers and indeed that these partnerships are now frequently seen in the much broader context of career long professional development. Indeed in Northern Ireland the notion of the ‘three Is’ is well established. In England we see the operation of the ‘training school’ initiative, in some US states, we have ‘professional development schools’, both schemes which promote a broader conception of professional development. While in Australia, the idea of ‘the learning and development community’ has been developed to include a research strand as well as supporting professional development.

As we present this paper, we await the publication of the second stage review of ITE in Scotland by the Scottish Executive. However, in the context of partnership, it is interesting to note that the remit of the Second Stage Review does not explicitly include consideration of partnership issues. In announcing Second Stage Review, the Executive made reference to the fact that a First Stage Review of Initial Teacher Education had already reported ‘on relations between local authorities and training providers, and student teacher placements in school’ (SEED 2003a). As will be discussed subsequently in this paper, that First Stage Review itself can be seen as leaving key issues unresolved in relation to partnership within Scotland. Therefore, while the publication of the Second Stage Review will be extremely significant for ITE in Scotland, there is a real possibility that important partnership issues will remain unresolved, if the Second Stage Review Report assumes that such issues have been resolved by the First Stage Review, and does not itself explicitly address the partnership issues.

1.2The convergence or divergence study

The study which this paper is based upon started in late 2002 with its origins in ourinterest in current developments in England and Scotland’s respective initial teacher education provision, especially in the ‘post-devolution context’ (see Paterson, 2000; Pickard and Dobie, 2003; Bryce and Humes, 2003). This in part stemmed from our assumption that there may exist ‘unique cultural configurations’ (Epstein, 1992: 13) in the ways in which ITE policy and practice are conceived, organised and conducted in these two countries. One purpose of the comparison is to test for ‘national uniqueness’ in the way ITE policy and practice take place in England and Scotland (Smyth et al, 2001: 28).

We adopted a socio-historical approach to comparative research which allows for the research objects to be considered in a dynamic perspective. In order to take into account the complexity and the dynamic nature of initial teacher education policy and practice, as socio-cultural processes, we adopted a culturally sensitive approach which is similar to what Humes (1986) calls a socio-cultural approach. Humes defines socio-cultural processes as ‘the complex fabric of norms, values, beliefs and traditions which combine to produce particular responses to specific educational issues at a given period in history’ (p.2). A central part of our approach therefore involves the examination of the interplay between history, culture and initial teacher education policy and practice. Taking into account the dynamic nature of the processes under study requires us to go beyond an analysis of institutional contexts and to give some consideration to key institutional actors who essentially act as mediators between the macro and the micro levels. When comparing educational processes in different national contexts, Broadfoot & Osborne (1993) stress the importance of going beyond the formal and explicit differences enshrined in legal statutes and statutory documents to the actual perspectives held by individual actors which give meaning to their actions.

Research approach

The research method selected for this study is exclusively qualitative and the project comprises three strands: a historical, a policy and a practice strand which, we hope, provide three complementary and meaningful perspectives on the object of study.

In all three strands, participants’ own perspectives are seen as key to understanding teacher education practices in different national settings. A principal aspect of the fieldwork in all three strands therefore involved collecting key actors’ accounts thereby placing the emphasis on the lived experiences of key people ‘inside the system’, whether they be policy makers or teacher educators, in addition to the analysis of administrative, policy or institutional documentation.

Data Collection

The historical and policy strands of the study are very closely intertwined and a main research instrument is the semi-structured interview, carried out with current and retired members of key stakeholder institutions. This is a method supported by Humes (1986), McPherson & Raab (1988) and Ozga (1999) because it allows the gathering of data on the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of policy making and not only the ‘what’ and we see those ‘insider’s’ accounts as an essential complement to other available written sources.

The main objective of the practice strand is to offer a rich description of current practices, trends, issues in initial teacher education in Scotland and England which can then be analysed in relation to the data collected in the two other strands. We have adopted a multi-site, ethnographic approach to data collection and analysis:

-Eight ITE providers in both contexts were visited: five in England, and three in Scotland.

-In England, we carried out fieldwork within two university-led partnerships, one SCITT, one College of Higher Education, a GTP consortium.

-In Scotland we carefully selected three of the seven university led providers of ITE

The procedure for data collection in the practice strand was as follows:

  • semi structured interviews with carefully selected individuals
  • observations of classes, seminars and meetings in HEI departments and schools (observation is a particularly useful complement to interviews in the study of training practices and pedagogy and particularly of working interactions between the main actors)

We used a relatively loose framework for data collection within all three strands, in the form of themes generated through our reflection on various secondary sources and our experience and understanding of the processes and main aspects of initial teacher education in both countries.

The nature and number of themes covered during the various interviews depended on the profile of the respondents (institution-based, school-based, students / senior staff, training and supervising staff), their background and expertise and specific remit in the provision, the time available, the nature of the programmes for which they are responsible, in which they are involved.

What started to emerge in the course of the fieldwork, was that although there are common features and trends in the way initial teacher education takes place North and South of the border, there seem to exist significant differences within the pattern of influences affecting Scottish and English initial teacher education provision respectively.

The processes involved in conceiving and implementing initial teacher education/training programmes are both country-specific and institution-specific.

-Country specific in that providers of initial teacher education courses are part of a wider policy framework of stakeholders in ITE whose emergence and constitution are the product of national history.

- Institution-specific in that the processes involved in designing and implementing those programmes are cumulative and collective and consistent with the history and evolution of a given institution.

Data Analysis

It emerged from the data collection process that professional knowledge and partnership practices (between Higher Education Institutions, schools and LEAs in England and Scotland) were rich themes to investigate in a comparative study of convergence or divergence in ITE policy and practice in England and Scotland. These two aspects are inextricably linked to the particular configuration of governance of ITE in each country. The initial process of data analysis consisted in content analysis of interview transcripts around the two themes initially selected. The themes provided a necessary focus for initial analysis but were seen as loose enough not to preclude an iterative refinement of themes throughout the data analysis process. As such, each national dataset was not considered comparatively from the outset. Rather each national dataset was considered separately first, and analysis was anchored in a socio-historical understanding of the development of ITE in each context, refined through the historical strand of the study. The researchers moved from individual case study sample analysis to cross-sample analysis in each national dataset towards a more sophisticated understanding of features of professional knowledge and partnership practices in each context. The comparative investigation of convergence or divergence in the two countries’ conceptions of professional knowledge and partnership practices in ITE follows the completion of the two separate analyses of the national datasets for these themes.

National and comparative findings in relation to theme 1: professional knowledge, were reported elsewhere (Menter et al, 2004). So far, we have only completed the analysis of the Scottish dataset in relation to theme 2: Partnership. As such, we are not yet able to report findings from our English case studies. It is hoped however, that the Scottish findings presented here in relation to partnership will provide an initial basis for discussion of convergence or divergence in the way partnership is conceived and implemented in England and Scotland.

  1. The context for partnership in Scotland

The current authors have already presented elsewhere an overview of the development of partnership in Scottish Initial Teacher Education from c.1990 (Brisard et al, 2004, especially Chapter 3).

In that overview, we have argued that there was significant evidence entering the 1990s that Scottish ITE staff within the higher education sector were certainly interested in strengthening within Scotland models of partnership which moved beyond a duplication of roles between HEI providers and schools to a genuine complementarity of roles, leading to fully collaborative partnerships in the sense suggested in England by writers such as Furlong et al (2000).

A specific policy initiative was attempted in Scotland in the early 1990s which, if successful, would have begun a move toward the type of partnership favoured by the higher education staff already mentioned. This was the Mentor Teacher Initiative, piloted between 1992 and 1994. The Mentor Teacher Initiative would have established more formal, increased roles for schools within ITE partnerships. The initiative was to have been applied initially to secondary schools, but the model of partnership could have been generalised to the primary sector also.

As we have suggested elsewhere, the Mentor Teacher Initiative, which was withdrawn by Scottish ministers in 1995, failed not simply because of school staff resistance based on resource issues over workload, but also because of their resistance to accepting that an enhanced formal role within ITE was necessarily part of their professional responsibilities.

These unresolved tensions about achieving an enhanced role for school staff within partnership have remained in Scotland in the years since 1995. The GTCS Report of the Working Group on Partnership in Initial Teacher Education (1997) went some way towards arguing that working with student teachers was part of the professional role of teachers, but this was strongly linked to the argument that this enhanced role could only be achieved with additional resources being provided to schools.

In the period since the GTCS Report, the Scottish Executive has engaged in a number of internal exercises over partnership in ITE. These have included the Report of the First Stage Review of Initial Teacher Education already mentioned above (Deloitte & Touche, 2001). Certainly, these exercises have suggested a more consistent national framework to enable formal agreements to be concluded at local level between higher education providers, authorities and schools, with these agreements possibly formalizing an enhanced role for local authorities and schools. However, these outcomes have remained internal to leading policy makers within the relevant stakeholder groups. They have not resulted in a confirmed public policy initiative to formalise enhanced partnership relations.

The current authors have also commented elsewhere (Brisard et al, 2004) on the ironic contrast between the failure to achieve formal progress on ITE partnership issues and the very significant progress on other professional issues relating to Scottish school teaching which have followed the implementation of the national agreement ‘A Teaching Profession for the 21st Century’. These other developments have included the successful establishment of the guaranteed one-year induction scheme for new teachers, and the establishment of the Chartered Teacher pathway as a significant element of enhanced Continuing Professional Development opportunities for Scottish schoolteachers. Perhaps the contrast between these positive developments and the persistence of unresolved issues on partnership indicates the continuing difficulty in prioritizing issues of ITE to a sufficiently high place in the national political debate over school-related education issues within Scotland.

The present provision of ITE in Scotland is organized quite simply. There are just seven providers across the country, each of them is now a University Faculty, Institute or School of Education. In six of the seven cases, the current unit was in part created by merger with a former college of education.

However, in spite of this apparent simplicity, our early fieldwork confirmed that these seven providers, in order to deliver ITE effectively, are necessarily part of a complex set of relationships which include:

  • SEED (Scottish Executive Education Department)
  • GTCS
  • local authorities
  • the wider institutions within which they are based

and perhaps to a lesser extent (or less directly)

  • HM Inspectorate of Education, and
  • the teacher unions.

We can display in a visual way the preliminary representation of the wider framework of influence within which initial teacher education takes place in Scotland.

3. Discourses of partnership

It is our intention in this paper to explore the perspectives of some of these key players in order to assess the current state of partnership in Scottish ITE. What we are concerned with is looking at how individuals make sense of their work with students, what shapes the nature of their work and student experiences, those phenomenon, tensions, contradictory agendas, how they make sense of it, how they articulate it.

The data collected therefore is discourse based. When considering our approach to discourse analysis therefore we need to examine which theory of language is going to underpin our work. Traditionally, policy work has worked within a certain theory of language which can be referred to as language idealism, i.e this kind of policy analysis takes language to be a transparent vehicle for the expression of experience (Codd, 1988). Ogden and Richards’ (1923) have argued however that language bears an indirect relationship to the real world, one which is imputed because it is mediated by thought.

Our approach to discourse analysis presupposes a more materialistic conception of language which has been a major influence on the structuralist tradition. It considers that language is not simply a static set of signs through which one can express the external reality of their experience. It is an instrument through which people make sense of their experience, and construct it in a way. In the extreme, one could say that language precedes experience or at least its meaning is partly constructed through the speech act.

We aim to access individuals’ experiences through their discourses on those experiences but we acknowledge that language is a resources through which respondents make sense of their experiences, that is we take meaning and experience to be partly constructed through language. We believe it is important to illuminate participants’ own perspectives as a key variable in understanding teacher training practices in different national settings, how they themselves interpret the situations which interest us. This is because, in Blumer’s words, ‘ the actor acts towards his world on the basis of how he sees it and not on the basis of how that world appears to the outside observer’ (1971: 21).

In this paper we draw from a total of 43 interview transcripts collected from two main sources of interview data. Firstly we have conducted lengthy interviews with 8 carefully selected experts who hold or have held key posts in one of the stakeholder bodies. These we designate Scottish Policy makers (SPM), for the purpose of this paper. These include principals of the former colleges, representatives (present and retired) from the GTCS, from education authority directorates and from university providers. Secondly, we draw from some of the interviews conducted as part of our three Scottish case studies (A, B and C), specifically on 23 interviews carried out with staff at the HEIs (designated Lec) and 12 interviews with teaching staff at some of the schools which the HEI is working with (designated T). However, it should be noted that amongst the HEI staff were those in senior positions (designated SM), who could equally well be seen as members of the policymaking community, through their active involvement in national bodies.

3.1Policymakers

Initial teacher education and the university in Scotland

The accounts of retired principals of the former colleges point to the existence of a real concern, which can be traced back to the early 1900 about control, influence and connection with the teaching profession. The process of locating teacher education in universities had been ruled out because they were seen as inappropriate institutions to provide a strong professional education for teachers, and they were also unaccountable. As one of these respondents put it: