Measuring the quality of Initial Teacher Education partnership in Scotland

Across the globe Initial Teacher Education (ITE) is often conceived as a solution to the policy problems of education (Mutton, Burn, & Menter, 2017). It’s presence in the minds of policy makers and analysts at all levels stems from the belief that improving the quality of beginning teachers has a cumulative effect throughout the profession in subsequent years. Accordingly, much has been made of the need to measure the quality of ITE so that uplifts in areas such as student outcomes might occur. National Governments and international organisations, such as the OECD, cite ITE as a vital part of the education jigsaw. The Measuring the Quality of Initial Teacher Education (MQuITE) project is a pan-Scottish endeavour that seeks to identify ways in which the quality of ITE might be measured both during and immediately after initial preparation and how this initial work supports the development of excellent teachers in their first five years of teaching. The project started in 2017 and is due to run for 6 years in total. Funded by the Scottish Government, it is a collaborative effort between all eleven Higher Education Institutions who offer ITE across Scotland and the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS). Although in Scotland, ITE is only offered through HEIs, it is hoped that the framework will support developments in other jurisdictions. . The overall aim for the research is to develop, collaboratively, a framework for assessing ITE quality and to use it as part of a five-year cohort study. There are two research questions for the study:

How can quality in ITE be measured in a Scottish, context appropriate way?What does this measuring tell us about aspects of quality in different ITE routes in Scotland?