ABSTRACT
A thesis might be written on the insertion of ‘just’ in the first line of this extract from the UK Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (CATE) guidelines on the arrangements for secondary school and higher education training partnerships. In the context of these arrangements we shall consider the capacity of ‘just’ to allow supervisors to see that the future practice of supervision may differ little from that under preceding arrangements. The changes marked as fundamental in the second sentence of the extract are beyond the decision-making remit of most supervising teachers. Consequently teachers are faced with the prospect of a fundamental change which appears to leave them with an extension of their existing function. At the same time school managers face another externally imposed initiative. This is, however, not the limited picture envisaged by McCulloch (1993) in her analysis of the possibilities for a transformation of teacher education in the creation of school-university partnerships. She argues that the quality of initial training can be enhanced by ‘challenging the nature and processes of teaching and learning within a social framework which places education as a key experience in the enlightenment of individuals’ (p. 302) and cites the University of Reading initial teacher training programme’s examples of how this individual enlightenment might be achieved.
