Measuring quality in initial teacher education: symposium

Initial teacher education (ITE) in Scotland has long enjoyed an international reputation of high quality, in part due to its degree status and its professional regulation through the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS). ITE in Scotland has traditionally been fairly conservative and consistent, however, in recent years the range of routes into teaching has diversified considerably. This development is a response to a perceived need for both more teachers and for better quality teachers, particularly in relation to supporting the national aim of closing the poverty-related attainment gap. Surprisingly, however, we currently have no shared or consistent way of identifying or measuring quality of ITE in Scotland.
Representatives of all nine ITE providers in Scotland, together with GTCS, have therefore secured Scottish Government funding to carry out a project entitled ‘Measuring Quality in Initial Teacher Education’ (MQuITE). The MQuITE project seeks to develop and implement a context-appropriate approach to measuring quality in ITE, and to use the framework to study a cohort of 2018 graduates over a period of five years.
The symposium session will present a series of papers which provide an overview of the MQuITE project to-date. We start with a paper which problematises the concept of quality in ITE, providing a basis for our argument that it is a situated concept. We then go on to report on the key findings of the literature review, highlighting how these findings have informed the development of our quality framework. The final paper reports on emerging findings of the first empirical phase – a survey of all 2018 ITE graduates across Scotland, and surveys of associated university and school colleagues involved in supporting the graduates during their ITE programmes.
In the following roundtable session, we will start with the symposium discussant’s contribution, thereafter opening up the discussion to all participants in order to test out reactions to the project so far, and to hear about other perspectives on the issues raised. We therefore see this double session as both the sharing of research and a capacity-building opportunity for those interested in teacher education to share and stretch their own ideas.