ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a deconstruction of two important documents which dictate teacher education practice within Scotland. The Code of Practice for Students with Disabilities, issued by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA 1999) is part of a whole ‘suite of inter-related documents’ (ibid.: 1), on the basis of which all UK higher education establishments are held to account. The General Teaching Council of Scotland’s Medical Examination Standards for Admission to Courses of Initial Teacher Education and Training…and for Admission to the Register of Teachers (GTCS 1995) establishes the legally binding standards of ‘fitness to teach’ (ibid.: 1) and therefore governs entry into teacher education and the profession. Deconstruction of these documents reveals some of the exclusionary pressures they create for the disabled students they claim to be encouraging into higher education and into teaching. The process of deconstruction is intended to operate here as playful, positive and generative: ‘it’s not a question of calling for the destruction of such institutions, but rather of making us aware of what we are in fact doing when we are subscribing to this or that institutional way of reading’ (Derrida 1983: 125).
