ABSTRACT
Carolyn Horne was a child-centred teacher in the late 1960s and later became a student-centred teacher educator. As an early years specialist, she placed considerable emphasis on ensuring that the contexts for learning gave every opportunity for learner development. Passionately committed to initial teacher education (ITE) partnerships between primary schools and higher education, she saw them as a way of providing the best learning opportunities possible for students. But creating strong learning environments is not easy; as any early years specialist would confirm. Labelling a relationship between a school and a university a ‘partnership’ is not enough. Indeed partnership is perhaps a weasel word; able to mean so much and so little. Carolyn did nothing half-heartedly. Training partnerships mattered. They absorbed a great deal of her energy and were always worth the effort. But what makes an ITE partnership worthwhile? Partnerships which are more than loose couplings or simply contractual relationships need a number of conditions or attributes. Firstly they should allow members to contribute their own distinctive strengths to the partnership. This condition demands a respect for differences and a recognition that partnerships will themselves develop through the interaction of different ways of seeing and being. Secondly, partnerships should be aimed at a common set of purposes. Initially that might be ensuring that a particular student reaches the required standards, but I shall argue that these purposes might usefully embrace wider goals. Next, all partners need to feel that they are benefiting from active membership. Partnerships in ITE cannot accommodate sleeping partners, interested only in their unearned income. Active membership is demanding and can only be engaged in by those who see it as personally worthwhile. Finally partnerships need to be flexible with the capacity to accommodate changes in context and in the development of individual partners.
