ABSTRACT
The training of teachers to teach effectively in a multiethnic society was a partial success story until the late 1980s in Great Britain. Since the passing of the 1988 Education Reform Act, ideological and policy opposition to the preparation of all teachers for their role in an ethnically plural society has intensified. Teacher educators, required to concentrate on preparing students to teach and assess an ever-changing National Curriculum in the schools, on creating training partnerships with schools, and on responding to the demands of the new Teacher Training Agency, have been left with little time, encouragement or funding to develop multicultural, non-racist and globallyoriented curriculum approaches in teacher education.1 Courses developed to help intending and serving teachers towards an understanding of British society and Britain’s role in the modern world, to help them teach all young people mutual respect and cease to regard racially and culturally different citizens of their own and other countries as inferior and aliens, have, in the mid-1990s, all but disappeared. The view expressed in The Times Educational Supplement in 1990 that, ‘There is a definite intention to starve multicultural education of resources and allow it to wither on the vine,’ (Times Educational Supplement, 1990), was an accurate portrayal of political intentions towards teacher education for a plural society in the 1990s. This chapter documents the way in which a slow thirty-year advance in the professional training of teachers, in which issues and problems relating to teaching in a multiethnic society were beginning to be incorporated into initial, inservice and postgraduate teacher education, has been abrupdy thrown into reverse.
