Looking within: problematising visions of quality in Initial Teacher Education

Despite regular campaigns to improve the quality of ITE, the notion of quality itself remains contested, nebulous, and poorly theorised. This paper suggests some of the ways forward emerging from the MQuITE project, looking beyond measures or proxies of quality and considered the core question of what ITE stakeholders mean by quality both at policy level and ‘on the ground’. The paper is grounded in the work of Feuer et al. (2013) who identified different components of ITE to be evaluated in order to understand the provision as a whole. Following an extensive literature review of quality, measurement, evaluation and assessment in both ITE and in-service teaching (Rauschenberger, Adams, and Kennedy 2017), this was developed into the 8 components of the MQuITE framework (MQuITE Project Team 2018) which underpin the project methodology. Dr Adams will offer some insight into how the components of this study fit within the broader conceptualisation of quality and measurement in the specific context of ITE policy in Scotland, as well as offering suggestions for how quality in ITE may be usefully problematised.