Standards and accountability in teacher education

In this, the first of four chapters that look across all of the five countries, Aileen Kennedy notes that ‘standards’ in education generally and in teacher education in particular have become part of the wider emergence of an agenda around accountability. The chapter looks at this as a global phenomenon and then analyses the discourses of professionalism that exist in the five countries. A Critical Discourse Analysis approach is used to compare and contrast the teacher standards documents that have been published in each of the five countries. Although the rationale for standards is similar in all cases, the approaches taken vary enormously. The chapter also notes that there is a tendency for such documents to pathologise the individual teacher rather than to offer an accountability mechanism for the wider system.