A promotion of teacher professionality: Higher education and initial teacher education in England and Wales

Recent moves to relocate initial teacher education in England and Wales within a substantively school-led context are generally held to constitute an unprecedented and fundamental challenge to existing practices and relations in this field. This paper attempts to locate these developments in a broader frame of changing relations between state and profession. In order to contextualise the discussion that follows, the opening section of the paper contains an outline of the evolution of general notions of profession, professional preparation and higher education as these and their interrelations have been contested over almost two centuries by practitioner and state in England and Wales. The paper then explores some recent government interventions into initial teacher education for characteristic evidence that can illustrate the precise nature of these interventions. Finally, it seeks to place the interventions within a coherent policy perspective with regard to the unique interrelation of teaching and the state in the contemporary English and Welsh context.