ABSTRACT
Formal teacher education in England was developed in the mid-nineteenth century as one of a whole range of professionalized discourses that were addressed to the crisis of the city and the social and political problems posed by the new urban poor. Teacher education had its beginnings in the philanthropic, and later state, provision of elementary education for the working classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Until the late 1940s, the elementary school was the sum total of education that was provided for the majority of children in the UK. The 1944 Education Act introduced "Secondary Education for All" but as a differentiated, tripartite system. The delivery of teacher education from the nineteenth century until the 1960s was based in specialist teacher training colleges and university departments of education. During the 1970s, many of the secondary schools became comprehensive, that is, they were required to abandon selective entry and to recruit students from all abilities and backgrounds.
