The reform of initial teacher education in Wales: from vision to reality

Over the last four years, initial teacher education in Wales has been fundamentally reformed. The stimulus for those reforms were concerns about the quality of current provision, but more importantly a recognition by the Welsh Government that if their wider reforms of curriculum and assessment were to succeed, then teachers themselves had a key role to play. Teachers would no longer be simply required to 'deliver' a curriculum defined by others; they themselves would need to become active agents in realising that curriculum in ways that were appropriate for the children and young people they taught. What is being required is a new vision of teacher professionalism in Wales. But what are the implications of these changes for initial teacher education? The Welsh Government has taken the view that they demand a fundamentally different conception of how initial teacher education is organised, with both universities and schools working closely together to support student teacher learning. This paper sets out the background to these recent reforms, and then examines the way in which three key dimensions of the new model are being implemented in practice. They are: co-construction and governance; integrating university and school perspectives; and re-visioning mentoring.