ABSTRACT
Teacher educators in Scotland in 1994 feel themselves to be under great pressure. Looking southward, however, they see colleagues in initial teacher education in England embattled and embittered in ways that have not (so far) crossed the border. Loss of staff, closure of pre-service programmes, students’ feelings of neglect, breakup of partnerships with schools and the spectre of ‘the wholesale collapse of the teacher training system’ (Pyke, TES, 3 June 1994) are sources of unease as we watch England’s drama unfold, but they are not, as yet, the reality of our system and we have not experienced the acrimony of the south. Complacency is, of course, an inevitable risk, and the Scots are conscious that quite small changes in, for example, the political cast of characters could tip them into very difference circumstances. Scotland is still governed, after all, by a British Conservative government from Whitehall, albeit with the intermediary of the Scottish Office Education Department (SOED). Notwithstanding this important caveat, there are, as the Secretary of State for Scotland has said, ‘different circumstances and… distinctive institutional arrangements’ (Times Educational Supplement Scotland, 27 May 1994) as well as characteristic cultural and political climates which have a major impact on the ways in which the common aspects of British policy are implemented north and south of the border.
