Universities are vital to teacher training

By moving towards school-led teacher training, we risk damaging the professional status of teaching, says Chris Husbands...

We know that the performance of pupils and education systems relies to a significant extent on teacher quality: recruiting the right people and training them well. What we find at the heart of teacher recruitment and training in the highest-performing countries is schools and universities working together in close partnership. This is the ‘clinical model’ of teacher training, combining classroom practice in schools and professional training in universities. It is the ability to draw on the strengths of each that offers the best grounding for new teachers and for the teaching profession as a whole. (Positive engagement from the ministry of education also helps.) But what specifically do universities bring to the partnership, and why is it important? 

Teaching is a complex activity that requires the deployment of a range of skills and knowledge. New teachers need to develop practical and technical skills, but they also need to know why as well as how – they need a knowledge base for practice. They will also benefit from the ability to reflect on their practice and use research evidence to that end. Without these underpinnings, teaching is simply the repetition of observed experience. And there can be no question that we should be training and developing teachers for the profession, not just a particular school or cluster.

University researchers and teacher educators provide access to the available research on effective practices and how children learn, as well as wide-ranging subject and pedagogic expertise.  The best training builds close links between these different facets and practice. It certainly confounds crude notions that universities’ contribution is restricted to ‘empty theory’. To make a comparison with another profession: teaching hospitals are all linked to a university; medical students and doctors have the chance to see the relationship between research and practice and learn to understand the nature and importance of evidence. 

This is arguably the mark of a professional, and applies throughout a professional’s career.  (We are often too focused on new entrants to the teaching profession, who comprise only a very small percentage of teachers.) Inspired in large part by the health sector, and spurred by Ben Goldacre’s 2013 review, there is growing momentum behind efforts to establish teaching as a truly research-led profession. I am a strong supporter of current efforts to establish a Royal College of Teaching, which can play an important role in advancing this cause. As in health, it is universities that are best able to support a research-literate and research-active teaching profession – not because practice does not matter, but because the best practice is informed by research. 

In the frequently cited examples of Finland and Singapore, all this is taken for granted.  Singapore, for one, is investing heavily in educational research that will feed back into practice; they are surprised at the direction of reforms in England and the prospect they present of a cottage industry for teacher preparation.   

All this concerns the nature and quality of teachers’ professional formation. Teacher supply is equally important, and, again, universities have a vital role.

There are the practicalities: universities offer a convenient way of recruiting large numbers of graduates; their relatively large scale (in one case training over 1,400 teachers a year) means they have the capacity to accommodate increased numbers of trainees on a flexible basis. Universities also provide an infrastructure for quality assurance and pastoral support and advice. In each case, though, universities bring so much more than efficiencies and economies of scale. The involvement of prestigious universities in the delivery of teacher training can only help in raising the status of teaching as a profession, putting it on a par with those of medicine and law. We cannot rule out the part that affiliation with universities plays in the particular appeal of Teach First. A mark of the common currency provided by academic standards, a teacher who wishes to teach elsewhere in the UK, or overseas, will need a university qualification such as the PGCE, not just QTS.

As the government itself recognises, we need to learn from and benchmark ourselves against the best-performing systems internationally. In these countries, teacher training and professional development involve significant input from universities – it is rooted in their research expertise.  Recent reforms in England to establish a ‘school-led’ system pose both opportunities and threats to our ability to match the best in the world. If we are to realise the opportunities, we must secure a sustainable future for the full involvement of universities in teachers’ professional formation and development.