ABSTRACT
Sound theoretical knowledge is essential to teachers and the development of this knowledge must begin at the start of the initial training period. However, preparation for teaching is no longer a question of education involving an academic as well as practical initiation into the profession, but a question of training. Initial teacher training today is prescribed by a framework of mandatory competence-based standards, largely of a practical orientation, which places theoretical knowledge on the margins of beginning teachers’ professional knowledge. Student teachers express high expectations of their courses in terms of developing their practical expertise, but relatively low aspirations of becoming autonomous professionals. The PGCE offers an intensive, highly structured and regulated period of initial professional training which student teachers see as coherent and generally meeting their needs as they perceive them, but which appears to ‘limit the development of broader perspectives on education’ (Whitty 2002: 76).
