How to teach the teachers

Amid all the publicity surrounding performance-related pay and fast tracking for teachers, one significant element of the Government's Green Paper has attracted surprisingly little attention at all. The section on how you become a teacher in the first place. As with all things educational, this is mired in controversy.

At the moment there are two main routes into teaching, both of which already involve trainee teachers spending the majority of their time in school. As a broad rule of thumb, primary teachers usually qualify by taking a four-year undergraduate course leading to a BEd, while secondary teachers normally take a subject-specific degree first, followed by a Postgraduate Certificate in Education. In what has become known as the partnership model, schools and higher education institutions or university departments share responsibility for educating student teachers.

But this model has come under attack, most notably from the chief inspector Chris Woodhead, who questions any link with higher education at all when it comes to training teachers. Despite once being a teacher-trainer himself, he believes that teaching is best learnt at the chalk-face. Yet his belief in "on-the-job training" cannot be disconnected from his well- publicised disdain for educational research, the subject of his last annual lecture. His message appears to be, rather as it was under the Tories, remove teacher training from the clutches of the educational establishment and all will be well with our schools.

At first glance, it appears that Woodhead's views have prevailed in Labour's Green Paper, for there is barely a mention of higher education at all. But this is not the whole story. Essentially the Green Paper is an attempt to stem the growing recruitment crisis by adopting a number of creative solutions particularly aimed at the secondary sector, where shortages are the greatest.

Among the "key proposals" are employment-based routes into teacher training: undergraduate taster courses, more school-based teacher training and a move to more modular courses. All these proposals are designed to "make initial teacher training more flexible". In fact, many of them already exist in some form or other.

Graduates can take part-time courses spread over two years. And a number of universities already offer taster courses as well as degrees in shortage subjects like science, maths and modern languages, which also lead to qualified teacher status. Perhaps the best-known of these alternative routes, however, is School Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT). Set up under the Tories, these courses were designed in part to obviate the need for higher education in teacher training and, as a result, are not without controversy.

One of the first SCITT programmes, based at Douay Martyrs in Hillingdon, London, recently failed its Ofsted inspection. The school, in the vanguard of the movement towards school-based teacher training, had already made the decision to end the scheme before the inspection report because it had become too difficult to staff. And it is this kind of problem, one of economy of scale, that concerns Peter Mortimore, Director of the Institute of Education in London. While supportive of much of the Green Paper, Mortimore believes that the move away from higher education that is implied in the proposals will simply not be cost-effective if school- based teacher training is increased.

Richard Pring, Professor of Education at Oxford University, has more wide-ranging concerns. Although he recognises the Government's attempts to diversify routes into teaching as a way of reflecting the different talents that prospective teachers might bring, he sees inherent dangers in the trend. "With so many different routes, it is likely to undermine higher education provision and this will, therefore, weaken a well tried- and-tested route." He fears that with the future so uncertain, university funds for education departments may well dry up.

Pring, who pioneered the partnership model of teacher education in Oxford in the Eighties, fears that even this, with its emphasis on school-based experience, is threatened by proposals in the Green Paper. At the moment, university departments devolve the money they are given for the students to schools. The Green Paper's proposal is that the money should go straight to the schools. If this happens, Pring believes "university departments will just close down because the funding will be too uncertain."

For Matthew Day, who is a student at the Institute of Education, that partnership between university and school has been integral to his becoming a teacher. An ex-health service manger, he withdrew from a prospective job at an independent school, for which he needed no teaching qualification, in favour of attending the Institute.

"I'm glad now that I didn't go down that route because I would be experimenting before I actually knew how to teach," he explains. "To my mind, you need the theory behind the practice to do it well. Good teaching is so multi- faceted and works on so many levels you really need to understand what and why something is effective," he says.

Interestingly, the closure of university departments would also worry John Wilkes, who is a tutor for the Urban Learning Foundation, a school- based teacher training scheme which is organised across a number of schools in Tower Hamlets. Wilkes is quite clear that he does not simply offer on-the-job training. "I feel very positive about the course we offer, but I couldn't operate the scheme if there weren't people in higher education doing the research because I use it all the time," he says.

He sees himself as a small-scale version of the higher education institution which validates his course. His students agree. Joanne Burden, who came straight from a degree at Durham to join the course, believes they have got the balance between theory and practice right. "While I've had lots of time in school, they've expected high academic standards." Burden, too, is worried about how more school-based training might look. "Many of my friends wondered why I was going into teaching. I think it's very important for the academic side to be promoted more."

It is hard to see how undermining the academic route into teaching can help make it more attractive to the kind of graduates Labour wishes to persuade into the profession. And it is this, along with the difficulty of regulating standards across so many points of entry, that most concerns Professor Pring about the Green Paper. "They are putting forward policies, the consequences of which we have no idea," he concludes.

HERBERT WARD, the Chief Inspector of Schools, 70 years ago made the connection between the academic standing of training and the status of teachers. "Teachers should be trained to do their work, not following blind tradition, or even immersed in the particulars of technique, but with some knowledge of the philosophical bases of teaching and of education."

Universities were the place for teachers to become endowed with this philosophical base. From the turn of the century, universities concentrated on training teachers bound for elite grammar schools. The bulk of teachers were trained in teacher-training colleges: "grim, harsh, authoritarian places in the pre-war years", according to Dr David Cook, lecturer in education at the Institute of Education.

There was a loose connection between universities and these colleges in the pre-war years; although as Harry Judge, former director of the University Department of Education Studies at Oxford University, points out, it was more of a "ghostly, unsatisfactory relationship". Their attitude towards teacher-training was that it was not an academic discipline in which research could be properly formulated.

The McNair Report of 1944, calling for teaching to become an academic profession, was to change that attitude. After 1945, teacher-training was seen as an alternative form of higher education. As the post-war baby boom made its mark, new training colleges opened to cope with the increasing numbers of applicants for the Teacher Training Certificate.

The TTC was initially a two-year course, but was extended to three in 1960. Although the education establishment still regarded it as "beneath" a "proper" degree, some colleges began offering a Bachelor of Education, validated as a degree by some universities.

The Robbins Report of 1963 furthered the argument of making teaching an academic profession, and led to "theory" gaining precedence over practical skills.

During the Sixties, the baby boom slowed and training places were drastically cut. In 1972 the education secretary, Margaret Thatcher, produced the White Paper "Framework for Expansion" which led to more than half the training colleges closing.

Now the wheel has turned full circle, with attempts to remove teacher- training from the educational establishment and go back to practical, school-based training, as recommended by the Conservative government's White Paper in 1992.

Herbert Ward would probably not approve. His successor, Chris Woodhead, does.

Chris Brown