At one time it seemed straightforward to go from a first degree into a secondary school teaching career. Sometime during their final year, students applied for a place on a CertEd (later PGCE) course at their own or another university. After graduation they went on to that, and then they became teachers.
It has become much more complicated recently, and it seems about to become even more dsifficult to comprehend. We have for some years had 'Teach First' which produces a different balance between the school placement and the acacdemic learning. Financial incentives to try to get the best graduates into teaching in subjects such as Science and Maths also changed the previous equality in treatment of students entering different disciplinary areas of the profession. At the same time the funding to universities for teacher training started to be eroded. Some years ago the Institute of Education in London threatened to pull out of initial teacher training because the finances didn't stack up, and Sheffield joined in the campaign that was then partly successful in raising the resourcing level. From 2012 onwards, of course, students taking a PGCE will be subject to the £9k fee because - for reasons I have never understood - the PGCE is regarded as equivalent to an undergraduate-level qualification and public funding for it is being cut, to be replaced by student fee. A number of universities have stopped PGCE training in certain subjects, so the choice of institutions to train at is often very limited. When I was Head of Economics I observed that there was little encouragement to train to teach the subject in schools for anyone graduating from Sheffield, the LSE or Oxford when the only two GCSE providers in Economics were in very poorly-ranked post-92 universities.
There now seems to be a belief in certain circles that studying how to become a teacher in a university context (plus placements) has little value. Instead all the training should be done on the job. Imagine the same argument being applied to surgery, general practice, or architecture. I for one would much rather be treated by a doctor who has been trained through a combination of education in anatomy and physiology alongside supervised obesrvation and practice, rather than one who had simply been sent along to learn by watching and doing.
But today I was involved in a meeting about 'School Direct', a new way of training new teachers. They will be recruited to a school - indeed to a school which intends to employ them in the longer term. They will not come to the university, or be mentored from the university. They will be supervised entirely within the school. They will not meet educational researchers, or learn about the new developments in thinking about the delivery of their discipline. And yet there is still a nod in the direction of universities in the scheme because although these individuals will not obtain any qualification whatsoever from their training period (no PGCE, no CertEd, no MA), universities are being asked to register them. They will be on our books in some way but for a non-qualification, with no content provided by the university, no assessment undertaken by us, and no degree award at the end. The university will have virtually no contact with these 'students': instead it will in some way supervise the way in which the performance of these trainees is being assessed in the schools in which they are working.
What a contrast with various mainland European systems that I know - where to become a specialist secondary school teacher a student moves onto a specific degree track for 2 or even 3 years for the integration of subject knowledge with the development of expertise in pedagogy.
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