ABSTRACT
The relationship between higher education institutions and schools has been a central focus of government policy in initial teacher education for more than ten years now (DES, 1984; DES, 1989; DFE, 1992; DFE, 1993a; DFE, 1993b; Wilkin, 1991, 1992). Circulars 3/84 and 24/89 (DES, 1984, 1989) both attempted to reconstruct that relationship by emphasizing the importance of practical teaching competence and insisting on a formal role for teachers in the training process. The central motif of both of these earlier circulars was ‘integration’; all initial teacher-education courses had to achieve a close integration between the higher education institutions and school-based elements of their programmes, though the ways in which that integration was to be achieved remained unspecified. What is distinctive about the Government’s most recent initiatives in primary and secondary initial teacher education (DFE, 1992, 1993a) is that they specify one particular means of establishing integration; integration is now to be achieved through the development of partnerships with schools, where schools exercise ‘joint responsibility’ for courses. Given the significance of these recent changes, the move towards partnerships between the institution and school-based elements programmes, has necessarily become an issue of central interest in the Modes of Teacher Education (MOTE) study which is monitoring national changes in initial teacher education over a five-year period (1991-5).
