ABSTRACT
For teacher education, the direct consumers are, presumably, the student teachers, although it is the schools who ‘consume’ the output from the training process by employing newly qualified teachers. However, it is the children who are the intended consumers of the teaching actually undertaken and it is their parents who are frequently portrayed as sceptical about the sort of primary education that is provided. One contradiction which is often pointed out about current government reforms of teacher education is that the intention is to give schools more control over the training process whereas these same schools are seen as the defenders of outdated ideologies detrimental to true progress (see the first annual lecture by Her Majesty’s
Chief Inspector, Chris Woodhead, as reported in Hackett, 1995). However, this assumes the schools concerned remain the same, whereas the intention of the wider process of reform is to transform their character through the three-fold pressures of national regulation, inspection and parental influence, the last exercised through both governing bodies and the quasi-market. The ‘new’ primary school, shorn of child-centred ideology, invigorated by a strong commitment to moral and spiritual education and accountable to parents whose main wish is to maximize the academic attainments of their offspring, is then seen as the ideal place for new teachers to acquire their skills.
