Keywords

10.1 Introduction

Teacher education is a complex, dynamic, and constantly evolving professional practice. In its widest sense, teacher education takes different forms across the career span of a teacher, regardless of national context. Globally, teacher education is heterogeneous in nature and as such different countries engage in teacher education in a variety of different ways. We believe that this is a strength, not a limitation, and we have tried to capture a flavour of this heterogeneity throughout the chapters of this edited book. The nature of teacher education as a field of research, scholarship, and practice is characterised by the various ways different stakeholders within different national education systems interact with, and influence, one another. However, as Mifsud (Chap. 1) indicates policymakers tend to focus on the notion of teacher quality, seeing teacher education as a ‘policy problem to be solved’ and frame teacher quality as an intrinsic characteristic of both the individual and their initial teacher education (sometime referred to as pre-service education or training), without considering that the different career pathways within the profession require different types of learning and exposure to different experiences to facilitate teachers’ development.

There are several problems with the way policymakers view teacher education ‘as a policy problem to be solved’ (Ellis & McNicholl, 2015; Mifsud, 2022). First, politicians and civil servants, who are the main policymakers in the education system, often view learning, teaching, and teacher education in rather simplistic terms as diffuse, disconnected, linear processes which it clearly is not. Second, they often view these processes as unproblematic when they are often highly problematic. Third, they assume that the best way to improve educational outcomes for children and young people is to improve the quality of teachers (however that is defined), and by extension teacher education, without viewing the learning and teaching process, as well as teacher development, as separate but interrelated social enterprises. Lastly, they seem to believe that the only way to resolve perceived deficiencies in the education system is through policy reform. We would argue that such thinking is wrongheaded, at best, and detrimental to the system, at worst.

It is our contention that both the learning and the teaching process, as well as teacher education are complex, dynamic, interconnected, nested, hierarchical, and highly problematic processes within a larger education system. When policymakers view these processes in reductionist and/or in deficit terms, there is little hope that teaching and teacher education will be seen by all educational stakeholders as academic work that is characterised as praxis, which is both temporal and spatial and influenced by differing environmental factors that act as drivers that can both push and pull learning in different directions, and in often unpredictable ways.

This final chapter is structured around reflections on the main themes that emerge from the various contributors’ chapters. The discussion within this chapter will attempt to follow the developmental trajectory of a teacher, beginning with concepts that are central to our understanding of the purpose of teacher education, before exploring these in the context of initial teacher education (pre-service) before moving on to induction of early career teachers into the profession and gradually progressing to teacher developments in the mid through to later years of a teacher’s career. Before we go on to outline this discussion, we must first frame our understanding of teacher education as a learning journey and trajectory.

10.2 Teacher Education as a Learning Journey and Trajectory

The metaphor of teacher education as a journey sums up the learning that teachers undergo across the span of their careers. The concept of ‘learning trajectory’ introduced by Eraut (2004) and further developed by McKee and Eraut (2011) provides some useful insights into what teachers as professionals learn over time. Across all the chapters of this book, we see that teachers learn in a variety of ways and in different contexts. They learn formally when they undertake qualifications with a university or other educational providers, for example, in initial teacher education at the beginning of their career. They learn informally through self-directed reading, observation, collegial discussion, and debate or through professional enquiry from early in their career to the end of that career. They also learn non-formally every day through reflective practice on direct classroom experiences. It is through this complex series of interactions between the school(s) context, culture, and departmental ethos and the formal, informal, and non-formal learning that the teacher engages with over time which facilitates the development of both their own teacher identity, self-efficacy, and agency as well as their professional competence.

The trajectory approach taken within this book allows teacher education scholars to explore the notions of teacher education beyond a simple focus on ‘teacher competences’ towards a more developmental approach to teacher education and the learning that occurs within a teacher’s career. The work of Eraut (2007), Eraut and Hirsh (2007) provides a typology of learning trajectories that develop and progress (or regress) in different ways and at different times over the course of an individual’s whole career. These typologies relate to task performance; role performance; awareness and understanding; academic knowledge and skills; professional development; decision-making and problem solving; judgement; and teamwork. When viewed through the perspective of professional performance, progression within a career trajectory depends on the range and complexity of its contribution to those performances in which they were used within a particular context, thereby being more reflective of what happens in the workplace, the type of work carried out, and the opportunities and challenges that the teacher encounters during their career (Sharu, 2012).

The importance of viewing teacher education as a career-long trajectory has been underscored in England by the aftermath of recent reforms to teacher education, under the auspices of the market review of Initial Teacher Training and Education (ITTE), where the complexity of teacher education is ‘on the face of it’ reduced to an apprenticeship model. From an outsider’s perspective, this reform seems to be ideologically driven and one that privileges ‘learning on the job’ over a partnership model where staff from university schools of education work together in partnership with school-based staff to develop, support, and nurture initial teacher education student teachers. University expertise is also used by schools to support the career development of experienced teachers throughout their career. Central to the reforms to ITTE in England is the argument that a teacher can be trained rather than educated, an argument that we will return to later in this chapter. However, the question for us to consider is how do we develop pre-service and in-service teachers to thrive in the profession and be secure in their abilities to deliver quality teaching and learning? We would suggest that to be able to answer this question, we need to understand what the role of a teacher is. Teachers today are expected to do much more than merely teach and develop within children and young people the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and dispositions that society deems appropriate. So, what lies at the heart of what it means to be a teacher? To begin to answer these questions, we need to look more closely at the role and tease out some of the main features of a teacher.

Two complex concepts are gaining increasing traction and prominence in teacher education and teacher education research, since they lie at the heart of the purpose of teacher education, these concepts being teacher identity and teacher agency (Jenlink, 2021; Mifsud, 2018; Priestley et al., 2015). The reason why these two concepts have risen in prominence is in part, due to the way educational stakeholders and educational policymakers in general, engage with teacher education both as a ‘policy problem to be solved’ and ‘as academic work’ but also due to them being essential concepts to the development of teachers’ (both pre-service and in-service teachers) and how these concepts influence the way teachers’ go about their everyday work.

10.2.1 Teachers’ Professional Identity

As a central concept of teacher education across the career-long trajectory, the development, refinement, and shaping of teachers’ professional identity is arguably the prime concern of the academic work of teacher educators across different national contexts. Teacher identity, as a concept, has struggled to feature deeply in the minds of many teacher educators as it is rather ill-defined, if defined at all. This situation led Alistair Henry to state that “…the inner dynamics of teacher identity transformations remain a ‘black box’” (Henry, 2016). This lack of a common definition points to an uncomfortable truth—identity is a particularly complex concept to pin down (Vermunt et al., 2017). We will argue that in the context of this book, growth in teacher identity is conceptualised more as one of ‘becoming’ and ‘being’ a teacher (Gomez et al., 2007) that occurs within and between the interactions that individual teachers’ attitudes, beliefs, and values undergo when they intersect with learners, peers, and leaders of the educational contexts in which they happen to find themselves (Geijsel & Meijers, 2005; Walkington, 2005), rather than an exercise in gathering knowledge and skills as a linear process of professional development over time.

Jenlink (2021) posits that teachers’ professional identity influences all aspects of ‘becoming and being a teacher’, and agrees that teacher identity formation is a complex, dynamic, and emergent construct that can at times be an unstable process. We would extend this by adding that teacher identity is constantly formed, negotiated, and reformed under the influence of a multitude of different factors and experiences at both the personal and professional level over time. Teacher educators need to nurture the development of teacher identity in their students as they first learn to teach, and as they journey through their career gathering different experiences of teaching over time. Jenlink (2021) contends that teacher identity influences the decisions that teachers’ make in relation to teaching practice, the content and context of teaching and learning, and the nature of the interactions and relationships that a teacher has with their learners, peers, and school leaders over time.

We would argue that teacher identity is best conceptualised as a complex, dynamic, evolving, and emergent process (Beauchamp & Thomas, 2011; Beijaard et al., 2004). Where identity development arises from the way that the teacher (and student teacher) interacts within the confines of the socially constructed roles, meaning systems, and symbols of the cultural context within which they find themselves. It also forms because of the encounters they have as part of their initial teacher education and in the episodes of teaching practice that they experience daily. For example, educational researchers conceptualise teachers as more or less functioning by asserting and receiving different identities across their teaching experience. Therefore, teacher identity in this sense refers to the way an individual comes to know and understand themselves, and how they perceive the way others view them (at least within certain parameters) where identity is formed from a complex array of different factors that influence their perception of self within the context of the roles they perform personally and professionally (Beijaard, et al., 2004).

A key factor in teacher identity formation is the fact that teaching can be described as a process of socialisation (Beijaard & Meijer, 2017; Meijer et al., 2014; Bennett, 2013), that is made more complex by the culture and often the micro and macro political nature of schools. Inherent within this complexity are the tensions that lay between the differing philosophies of teaching and learning, underpinned by the teachers’ understanding of self (their values, beliefs, and behaviours), which in turn influences what is taught (the enacted curriculum), where this is further complicated by the way teachers interact with other factors such as national policy and school policies and procedures; and the structural constraints of the schools ethos and the cultures that exist within the school, for example, the teacher, learner, and Leadership cultures (Day & Grant-McMahon, 2016).

‘Becoming a teacher’ is a complex process that many student teachers struggle with, since it involves them adopting the identity of ‘teacher’. Student teachers often bring to the work of becoming a teacher a history that informs both their beliefs about teaching and what teachers are supposed to do. Often, they bring their personal experiences of school (conceptions and misconceptions of what teachers do) and of being taught as part of the ‘becoming’ process. Jenlink (2021) suggests that a clear self-image and a sense of ownership of an emerging and nascent professional identity is a necessary condition to help student teachers effectively apply the knowledge and skills that they have acquired from ITE into eventual workplace situations. Thus, teacher identity as a concept, has a psychological, sociocultural, and political dimension that is situated within the temporal and spatial plane.

It is the role of the teacher educator to support teachers in developing an awareness that the image they have of themselves under the reality of their performance in the classroom could be different from that which they perceive. It is through reflective practice that teachers and teacher educators can support student teachers to reflect on their learning experiences, to make sense of themselves, and where need be help them to incorporate themselves into their developing identity. This process supports both their developing professional identity but also their sense of self-efficacy within the role.

In their review of the concept of teacher identity, Beijaard et al. (2004) note that identity is relational, in that it shifts depending on context, is flexible as the individual adopts different roles and is therefore often role-focused since identity develops as the teacher engages in acts of practice and forms as an individual’s awareness of their growing identity increases through reflection on practice. Rodgers and Scott (2008) suggest that teacher identity is unstable and requires a psychological shift in the way the teacher thinks of themselves as teacher, therefore, the development of a coherent teacher identity involves the individual continually trying to answer the ‘what kind of teacher am I?’ and ‘who do I want to become?’ questions as well as the ‘who am I at the moment?’ question. As Day and Grant-McMahon (2016) suggest teacher identity affects the “sense of purpose, self-efficacy, motivation, commitment, job satisfaction and effectiveness” one has as a teacher (p. 601).

In Chap. 4, Mena et al. (2023), quantitatively explore how pre-service (student) teachers experience of practicum (school placement teaching experience) impacts their developing sense of self-efficacy as part of their professional development towards becoming a teacher. They found that pre-service teacher’s sense of self-efficacy was impacted by several factors, including whether teaching was their first or second choice programme of study, the level of school-based support they received from teachers and mentors and the educational content of the lessons they were teaching. This study highlights the importance of school practice to the pre-service teachers growing sense of self ‘as teacher’ and that as pre-service teachers’ sense of self-efficacy increases, their performance in the role improves and their professional identity grows.

Drawing this discussion on teacher identity back to reflecting on Eraut’s (2012) learning trajectories framework for one moment, it is important to note that as a teacher progresses throughout their career, their identity shifts in a myriad of directions depending on personal preferences and how the individual see their career progressing. Some teachers may want to remain as an experienced classroom practitioner, while others may want to gain promotion to a leadership and management role such as a principal teacher of a curricular area or move into a formal leadership role such as deputy head teacher or Head Teacher. Some may want to develop their knowledge and skills with further specialised training in additional support needs or support for learning roles, while others may see themselves in a pastoral support and guidance role.

The question of what motivates a teacher’s career choices and direction of development, is also a complex set of personal and professional factors ranging from personal satisfaction, financial reward to a natural desire to lead. McKee and Eraut (2011) draw our attention to the way that different professionals apply their learning trajectory in action and exemplify the fluctuations within their professional ‘identities’ over time as they develop and transition between old and new roles. What Sharu (2012) highlights in their research is that practitioners who are allowed to take on greater responsibility, do so with support and further training and have a clear sense of agency to reach the desired level of performance demanded by the new role without having to move to a new organisation. What is clear from this research is that the cultural setting of the workplace is a factor in whether an individual can develop or not, with some individuals not being able to progress due to a lack of opportunity or affordances that meet with their development needs, so they move on to another setting. This is a scenario that is all too common in teaching and is one that both co-editors have experienced in our careers. However, as both Jenlink (2021) and Sharu (2012) highlight the fact that teacher identity is a complex relational; flexible; context-dependent and role-focused concept.

Indeed, a few chapters in this book touch on this point, specifically in Chaps. 2 and 9 where Carol Campbell (Chap. 2) highlights the ways that ITE programme accreditation regulations in Canada proscribe the kinds of topics that student teachers must encounter during their ITE programme. It is arguably in this phase of a teacher’s development that they develop interests depending on individual preference, which once qualified and certified, may grow into an area of specialism that take them down a particular career pathway. Mitchell et al. (2023), (Chap. 9) also discuss the way that teacher leadership can grow into positional leadership in areas such as pastoral support and curriculum management roles within schools where aspects of distributed leadership provide the context and affordances for teachers to take their careers down a particular path.

10.2.2 Teacher Agency

Priestley et al. (2015) suggest that the terms agency and teacher agency are often applied loosely and uncritically. In much the same way as teacher identity, teacher agency is conceptually difficult to pin down and can be described as a much-contested term, to the point where Priestley et al. (2015) say “… that some people may wonder why we need such a concept in educational and social research in the first place or why we would need to have a notion of teacher agency” (p. 19). They further go on to suggest that the difficulty with pinning down the notion of agency can clearly be seen in a common tendency to conflate agency with action. In the context of teacher agency, we concur with the view that teacher agency is an emergent phenomenon which is something that can be achieved by individuals, through the interaction between the personal capacities and resources, affordances, and constraints of the environment into which that individual must act (Priestley et al., 2015). This perspective sees agency as an individuals’ capacity to work within the contextual dimensions of their professional setting to shape their agency and views the development and achievement of agency as a temporal process rather than an innate capacity that may or may not be possessed, to varying degrees. It is also our contention that the concepts of teacher identity and teacher agency co-develop in different ways but in an interrelated manner across the career trajectory of a teacher dependent on context.

The main issue with how we define agency is the distinction between agency as variable, agency as capacity, and agency as phenomena. The trouble is that regardless of how we define the concept of agency, we run into problems when we fail to fully explore our stance on agency since the term has been theorised within many different intellectual traditions such as the post-modernist, post-structuralist, or sociocultural traditions to name but a few. However, discussions about agency are often conducted in terms of the structure-agency debate, as can be seen in the example of Jill in Chap. 6, where there is a tendency to focus on the socialised macro view of agency, thereby ignoring the local and specific (proximal), or to concentrate overly on individualised notions of agency thereby ignoring questions of structure, context, and resource (Fuchs, 2001). Agency involves the capacity to formulate possibilities for action, the active consideration of such possibilities, and the exercise of choice, which Priestley et al. (2015: p. 23) suggest is the essence of intentionality. However, agency also includes the influence of contextual factors such as the social and material structures and the cultural norms that influence action and behaviour.

Looking more specifically at the importance of identity and agency, Lord (2023) (Chap. 6), discusses details of a new Teacher Reflexivity, Agency and Identity tool (TRAIt) which focuses on how reflexivity, in particular, communicative, autonomous reflexivity and meta-reflexives position the teacher, within both their sense of self as a teacher in the present, and the educational context within which they work, where she suggests that reflexivityFootnote 1 can perhaps be best described as our ‘inner conversations’ and that reflexivity is the bridge that mediates ‘deliberatively between the objective structural opportunities confronted by different groups and the nature of people’s subjectively defined concerns’ (Archer, 2007, p. 61).

Lord (2023) posits that it [reflexivity] has a crucial role in determining social action and is potentially powerful and emancipatory. By drawing on empirical work to illustrate the developmental trajectory of a teacher—Jill—Lord (2023) shows how different factors (both personal and professional) impact on her Identity and agency over time and how she acts within her role, since she has responsibility for supporting learning but is also accountable for attainment given her position. The TRAIt model also maps both transitions in her professional life (moving from one school to another) to having responsibility for a department to working with more able pupils in her new school. The proximal, meso- and macro-level clusters contained within the TRAIt model indicate how the wider policy and school cultural context orientate and focus the way Jill functions within her role and sets the micropolitical context around which Jill came to be in her current post in addition to her affective state—how she felt ‘forced by circumstances’ to take on that role. Lord (2023) also shows how issues around performativity and accountability, in this case for attainment results, also impact on identity and agency which highlights the influence of external and contextual factors on a teacher’s identity and agency which taken together can be disruptive, but not necessarily in a wholly net negative way.

Campbell (Chap. 3) explores how teacher education, and the notion of agency is conceptualised, formed, governed, and influenced in postcolonial Hong Kong by the interaction between eastern and western philosophies. Campbell suggests that while many teachers and teacher educators align their perspective on teacher Identity and agency with Priestley et al. (2015) view that teacher agency is a complex interaction between the sociocultural context of the school and wider system and the teachers’ ability to act in accordance with their own professional values for the good of the pupils they teach. However, Campbell also suggests that within a context of sustained neoliberal influences over the political structuring and restructuring within education systems, he questions the possibilities for teacher agency in Hong Kong, where managerialist reform serves to disempower rather than promote teacher agency and where career-long teacher education emphasises compliance over criticality and professional collaboration. Drawing on the psychological perspective from the work of Albert Bandura, Campbell suggests that agency is the capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of one’s life while affirming that the notion that professional agency is practised when teachers and/or communities in schools influence, make choices, and take stances in ways that affect their work and their professional identity. This perspective highlights how agency might be understood in relation to a teacher’s ability to act independently or collectively with intentionality, where the aim is to reach a pre-defined goal. In many respects, this view dovetails nicely with Lord’s (2023) case study of Jill who spoke of the way that external factors, for example, how local educational policy forced her to move to another school. While it would be unfair to characterise teacher agency within Hong Kong as restricted, it is clear from Campbell’s analysis that teacher agency and how it relates to teacher education in postcolonial Hong Kong requires a nuanced understanding of how ecological factors influence individual teachers’ capacity to act with agency. It also requires an understanding of the structural norms, practices, and influences that enable or establish barriers to agentic forms of action.

10.3 Initial Teacher Education

It is fair to suggest that initial teacher education is regarded by all educational stakeholders as an important phase of a teacher’s professional development. However, as Mifsud highlights in Chap. 1, policymakers tend to view the initial phase of teacher education as a policy problem to be solved in respect of questions relating to teacher quality. This is problematic in many respects since there are several different models of initial teacher education being enacted across the globe. If we take the United Kingdom as an example, the four nations of the UK deploy very different models of initial teacher education. In Scotland, teaching is a graduate profession with over 60% of all new entrants to the profession coming into teaching from the Professional Graduate Diploma in EducationFootnote 2 (Gray & Weir, 2014). The rest come in through either a concurrent four-year undergraduate bachelor’s degree in a subject with Education or a bachelor’s degree in Primary Education.

This contrasts with what currently happens in England where there is a complex mix of university-led Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) programmes, School-Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) programmes, Schools Direct and Teach First that enables graduates to undertake their training within a school environment, leading to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) (Whiting et al., 2018). SCITT’s courses are usually run by local groups of schools, giving graduates the opportunity to learn ‘on the job’ thereby providing ‘trainees’ hands-on teaching experience with at least two schools. Most (but not all) SCITT programmes offer a PGCE qualification. Similarly, Schools Direct courses, like SCITT programmes involve the ‘trainee’ spending a year with at least two schools, getting first-hand teaching experience. These programmes can also (but not always) lead to a PGCE award. On successful completion of the programme, ‘trainees’ receive QTS. Often those who learn through the School Direct route are offered a job at the schools in which they have ‘trained’.

Central to these different models of initial teacher education, seen particularly within the UK, but is also prevalent in Canada (see Chap. 2) is the clear distinctions between how university-based teacher educators and educational policymakers view the development of new teachers. University teacher educators use the term ‘education’ whereas educational policymakers, and more importantly politicians, use the term ‘training’. However, these two terms signify different pedagogical cultures with training being the more ‘practical’, and education being more ‘learned’ (Stephens et al., 2004).

University-based teacher educators argue that they ‘educate’ student teachers to be critically reflective professionals, who can apply educational theories and adapt their practice to the ever-evolving demands placed on the profession across the career trajectory. Whereas policymakers and politicians often use the term ‘training’ to suggest that they view teaching as a technical act where teachers act like technicians’ who apply ‘techniques’ within their teaching practice in a more formulaic manner to support efficient delivery of the curriculum rather than professionals. Stephens et al. (2004) summarise the tension between these two perspectives by suggesting that education is a process of cultural formation and enrichment whereby education emphasises the development of character, whereas training views teachers’ knowledge as a series of practice heavy, theory light professional skills (standards?), with competence being measured against external benchmarks. They go on to highlight that the school system can be likened to ‘a delivery system where knowledge is packaged and transmitted, where quality control consists of checking to see if technical “mastery” of the required knowledge has been achieved’ (p. 113). The issue with this perspective on training being that while this approach looks neat, tidy, and efficient on paper, it fails to consider the complex and often messy kind of wisdom/teacher knowledge that can only be acquired through practice, critical professional reflection and discussion with knowledgeable peers which is the main feature of the education perspective on teacher preparation.

Initial Teacher Education programmes, regardless of how they are configured, undergo incremental changes over time as their programme teams respond to changes in policy that effect schools and universities, while incorporating new ideas from research and practice. They also construct their teaching carefully to reflect the changing nature of schooling and teaching practice as well as incorporating demands from national accrediting bodies. The nature of this process is illustrated in Chap. 7 where Wimmer et al. (2023) explore the changing trends in the course reading lists of special education teacher education programmes in Sweden. Wimmer et al. (2023) analysis clearly indicates the way that the shifts in readings over time in these programmes mirror the shifts and trends in policy, practice, and research by looking specifically at reading lists. What leaps out at the reader from this analysis is the fact that lists of obligatory reading are both a fertile source that maps the dynamics in teacher education over time but also that, in the context of special education, there was a ‘paradigm’ shift from a high proportion of psycho-medical-oriented texts towards more pedagogical-based texts in the last forty years, mirroring the trend in the research literature and in practice. This research indicates that shifts in trends within the wider field of education impact on the types of readings set for students by teacher educators and by extension influences what they do with their students in terms of teaching, engagement with policy discourse, and preparation for practice.

A recurring theme touched upon in a number of chapters in this text (specifically Chaps. 2, 4, and 5) highlight the importance of practicum to ITE programmes, where episodes of school experience are highly valued by student teachers as a way of bridging the theory–practice gap, and as an environment where they can test out their ideas, reflect on their successes and failures, receive advice from many different people from differing perspectives, and hone their teaching practice. Teacher educators also value episodes of school placement as a space where they can both support and assess their students developing teaching practice. It can also be used as a negotiated site of research through partnership with schools, student teachers, and local policy actors.

10.3.1 Teacher Induction

The preparation of new teachers does not end when student teachers graduate from their ITE programme. Most well-developed education systems provide further support for ‘novice’ teachers as they transition into the profession through systematic induction and mentoring. While teacher induction programmes might mark the beginning of the transition from a student teacher to being seen by school colleagues as a full-fledged teacher, this transition comes with some expectations on the part of the inductee, the school, and the system. Also, at the beginning of induction, inductees come with a natural mixture of anxiety surrounding the expectations they might face from the school, or the department they will be working with, as well as their own expectations for the experiences they might gain from the school and a healthy level of enthusiasm to get started working with the children and young people they will be teaching (Day, 2020). It is therefore important for early career teachers to be nurtured and supported into the profession in a way that orients their thinking and their practice in a way that sets them on the correct pathway that meets their development needs for the early part of their career.

In Chap. 5, Day and Shanks (2022) show that teacher induction, in the Scottish context, is designed to support early career teachers’ developing sense of teacher identity in a way that allows the early career teacher to consolidate their classroom practice, while simultaneously giving them classroom and whole school experiences that will allow them to build their sense of professional efficacy within a ‘safe space’. Indeed, Day and Shanks (2022) highlight that several factors influence the success or failure of induction with the role played by the induction mentor and the relationship between them and the inductee being pivotal to the induction process. With other factors such as school context, enculturation, and socialisation into the school community being major factors for successful induction and by extension in the development and orientation of the early career teacher.

By focusing their research on the inductee’s perspective, Day and Shanks (2022) pinpoint tensions within the induction system in Scotland that are useful for key educational stakeholders in Scotland. They also provide some critical questions that might be useful for the Scottish Government, who owns the Teacher Induction Scheme, the General Teaching Council for Scotland, who manage the scheme on behalf of the Scottish Government, and for Local Authority Induction managers who operationalise the scheme. In addition, Day and Shanks (2022) research poses some questions for teacher educators and their employers to reflect upon. For example, to what extent do teacher educators currently get involved in the induction system and how might this best work for the benefit of the education system in terms of partnership working.

What is clear from this work is the need for teacher educators, teachers, schools, and local authorities to work together in close partnership to better support early career teachers since the experiences of the inductees within their study indicate a mixture of experiences which are less than ideal, if the induction scheme aims to support early career teachers learning journey and help to retain the talent that many early career teachers clearly have for teaching moving forward.

10.4 The Role of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Within Education

As the previous discussions within this chapter indicate, continuing professional development is an important element of teacher education that supports the ongoing development of the teaching workforce. However, the availability of quality CPD over the last 15 years has been highlighted as a weakness in the system. In Chap. 8, Gibson et al., highlight the fact that in England, access to quality continuing professional development, particularly for the development of future leaders, has moved away from university-based CPD towards third-sector providers, who generally focus more on the delivery of functional knowledge at the expense of offering theoretical perspectives on the focus of development. In addition, Gibson et al., argue that in the context of leadership development, CPD should continue after an individual has been appointed to a leadership position since new leaders require different forms of leadership development as their needs differ from those of established leaders. In terms of supporting the establishment, development, and negotiation of differing teacher identities dependent on role within the education system, we would argue that a strong partnership model is needed to support the development of teachers and leaders between universities, schools, and local authorities or municipalities to strengthen the link between theory and practice, and to infuse a deeper understanding of how local context impacts notions of school improvement. The value of such support both in terms of self-improvement for the individual and for organisational improvement is understated.

By comparing three national contexts (England, Sweden, and Russia), Gibson et al., show the impact of neoliberal agendas on the development of leaders. For example, in England, the notion of system leadership, of organisations assisting each other in a ‘self-improving school-led system’ (SISS), has taken hold in a way that has significantly altered the role of the school leader and consequently the way that school leaders are developed. In addition, Gibson et al., highlight that in the English context the privatisation of schools in the form of Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) has led to a shift in control of the education system to a point where 39% of all schools are now academies with over half of all pupils (52%) in England attending this type of school (Department for Education, 2021). Furthermore, Gibson et al., point to the impact that transnational assessment systems have had on educational reform in Sweden, where these reforms have shifted both the curriculum and the way school leadership is conceived to accommodate such assessments. What this indicates is the complex ways in which transnational, international, and national policies impact, to varying degrees, on how education systems operate. The main determinant factor being the extent to which different National governments engage with and take on board the results of such assessments. This point is highlighted in the way that different European governments reacted to the 2009 results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) now referred to as PISA Shock (Baroutsis & Lingard, 2018). The theme of neoliberal marketisation within the education system is also touched upon in Chap. 3 where Campbell notes that as part of a broader neoliberal culture, Hong Kong has to navigate the complexity of maintaining and extending the region’s reach as both a global financial centre and a high achieving education system as evidence by its placing in the PISA rankings as well as its status as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China. Neoliberal utopian ideals come to characterise policy responses in the SAR as it relates to teachers, teaching, and education more broadly.

A worrying feature of Gibson et al.’s analysis of Leadership development is the situation they illustrate in Russia, where it is possible to be a school principal without even being a teacher if you have a Public Administration or Management background. Given the complex nature of schools, we would argue that it is imperative that a school leader has an intimate working knowledge of how learning occurs within different classroom settings to be able to make educationally sound decisions on how best to improve educational outcomes for all children and young people in their charge. The notion that anyone with management or administration experience can take on a school leadership role without the pedagogical understanding is disturbing. Also, the fact that in the Russian context, there as school principals that when in post, have the option of taking on a non-specialist development programme to support their leadership journey suggests that the Russian government views schools like businesses as opposed to educational establishments. This situation is contrasted in Chap. 9 where Mitchell et al. (2023), outline the pivotal role head teachers play in career-long professional learning (CPD in the Scottish context) within their schools. Mitchell et al. (2023), also highlight the fact that the role of head teacher is not comparable with leadership in other organisations and provide an image of school leadership, within the Scottish context, which shifts the balance in school leadership away from top-down management towards a distributed leadership model. With the positioning of head teachers as ‘Lead learner’ facilitates the move towards placing professional learning at the heart of the school improvement agenda.

Mitchell et al. (2023), point to tensions arising from several Scottish government policies along with the General Teaching Council for Scotland’s standards for Full Registration, Career-long Professional Learning, Middle Leadership, and Leadership and Management that teachers, middle leaders, and Head Teachers have to negotiate with respect to the goal of actively tackling issues of social justice within their teaching practice, while also being responsible and ultimately accountable for, pupils’ attainment. Mitchell et al. (2023), suggest that these tensions are reconciled by the Head Teacher being positioned as the Lead learner who facilitates and supports professional learning within the school community which is purposeful and impactful on practice. However, we would question the value of such positioning when access to support from experts in university who can act as critical friends is at best piecemeal. It is possible to argue that without outside support, many schools are susceptible to fads which suck time and money for little tangible reward. Without critical support from outside the school context, there is plenty of scope for confirmation bias to creep into evaluations of initiatives designed to reduce inequity and improve social justice.

10.5 Concluding Remarks

Throughout the chapters of this book, the contributing authors have illustrated the complex, heterogeneous nature of teacher education across the career trajectory of teachers. There are some areas of the world where university-based teacher education is under real threat, for example, in England where the Conservative government has instigated policies that will potentially exclude many universities from participating in teacher education within schools. However, there are other parts of the world where university-based teacher education is valued as a key partner in the education system.

The arguments put forward within this book suggest that educational stakeholders, particularly politicians, need to reflect on how educational policies steer the way teachers think about their everyday work. It is clear from the debate surrounding the use of seemingly simple terms such as training or education that a nuanced understanding of the complexity of teacher education across a teacher’s career trajectory is required by all educational stakeholders to take forward any reform agenda. We argue that education and schooling, requires a longer-term strategic focus on developing and improving the system beyond the current political cycle where politicians attempt to make short-term improvements in order to fulfil their manifesto pledges to the electorate. It is the ongoing politicisation of education that we see happening across international boundaries that is of particular concern.

Many politicians see education in simplistic terms since they at one point in their life attended school. However, they failed to understand that the school system that they experienced is no longer the school system they are faced with today. Discourse around the quality of teachers and teaching needs to be seen beyond teacher education as a policy ‘problem to be solved’. When governments view education as complex, non-linear contexts, they will see that simple policy solutions are not effective. What is required, in our view, is a depoliticisation of education systems where policy actors (and politicians) view schooling as a 30-year project rather than a five-year intervention. In many national contexts, policymakers often ‘tinker’ with education to varying degrees, resulting in cycles of reforms that despite being well-meaning, often fail to deliver the desired outcome. Teacher education, in its widest sense, is not immune to such tinkering, as can be seen within the English context at the present time.

When educational policymakers and teacher education academics work together in partnership and view teacher education, teaching and learning as a praxis and academic work, then it should be possible for consensus to form around the need for educational reform where the policies that emerge from such reforms might lead to successful implementation and a net improvement in educational outcomes. At present, what comes across from each of the chapters within this book is the view that for some national policymakers, political ideology drives the policymaking process rather than educational priorities, as exemplified in the ongoing discourse around initial teacher training and education in England. When national governments disenfranchise universities from engaging in teacher education, particularly from the ITE phase of teacher development, there is the risk that teacher education across the career trajectory will become narrowed, will lack a theoretical foundation, and ultimately renders teachers, school leaders, and other actors within the education system as subject to the directives of government rather than as servants to the communities that they serve.

There are several reflective questions that teacher education needs to tackle over the course of the next few years to develop a stronger educational work force.

  • How can teacher educators constructively engage with other educational stakeholders to take forward positive solutions to key educational priorities?

  • How can university-based teacher educators engage more effectively within the political discourse to better advocate for their expertise and have their professional voice heard by policymakers?

  • How can teacher educators better support teachers and school leaders to navigate the tensions within their roles?

  • To what extent can teacher educators influence teaching practice by engaging more constructively in partnership work with educational stakeholders involved in supporting early career teachers?