When Aileen Kennedy and Paul Adams set out their plans to follow hundreds of 2018 teaching graduates through the first five years of their careers, teacher education courses were under the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.

In an inquiry held by the Scottish Parliament’s education committee, a student teacher, on the cusp of finishing her training, revealed that she did not believe everyone graduating from her course had “sufficient skill in numeracy to be able to teach it to 11-year-olds at a reasonable standard”. Research carried out as part of the same inquiry also highlighted the varying length of time spent by different universities on teaching students how to deliver key aspects of the curriculum, such as literacy and numeracy.

The revelations resulted in a slew of negative headlines about teacher preparation in Scotland, with the Scottish Conservative leader at the time, Ruth Davidson, calling for new teachers to be made to sit literacy and numeracy tests before entering the classroom.

Meanwhile, John Swinney, then education secretary, was “very concerned by the wide variations” in time dedicated to different aspects of teacher preparation on different university courses. He said he planned to raise the issue with the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS).

Looking back at that time, Kennedy, now professor of practice in teacher education and director of teacher education at the University of Strathclyde, says that any objections from the teacher education institutions to the criticism just made them sound defensive. So, the idea of the Measuring Quality in Initial Teacher Education (MQuITE) project was born: a “groundbreaking and unique” study - as Kennedy described it in 2018 - that was going to follow hundreds of 2017-18 teacher education graduates as they progressed over the first five years of their careers. The goal was to reveal, once and for all, the essentials of high-quality ITE - as well as whether or not the sector was in good shape.

Teacher education ‘generally healthy’

Now the study is drawing to a close, and it concludes that there is no crisis in teacher education in Scotland. It says that teacher confidence when it comes to delivering key areas of the curriculum - including literacy and numeracy - is high and that graduates report “no real areas of persistent weakness”.

Indeed, “the overall headline message from the MQuITE study is that the ITE system as a whole is generally healthy, and there is definitely no ‘crisis’”.

However, the research does highlight that the way teachers are trained in Scotland is far from perfect, with real tensions between the two key partners that deliver that training: schools and universities.

On the one hand, school-based mentors talk about being overruled by the universities when it comes to assessing students, and say that their view - or the school’s view - is given “less weight”, even though, they feel, tutors only get a snapshot of student ability when they come in to observe them.

The research also uncovers a belief among some school-based mentors that universities have not taught “‘the basics’ before students arrive in schools” - for example, knowing how to write a lesson plan.

Schools complain, too, about having to contend with different lengths of placement and different placement patterns, depending on the programme or the university.

One respondent in the study wrote: “It is VERY, VERY troublesome that placement dates vary to the extent that they do…Please get together and agree consistent dates for each course - surely it can’t be that difficult to do this.” Another said: “There is no rhyme nor reason with placements in terms of timing, length or focus.”

Meanwhile, university staff talk about some school-based mentors going “above and beyond the call of duty to support their students’ professional learning” - but they, too, express frustration with the current set-up and feel that “some mentors should not be in the role”.

University staff report being frustrated “that some school-based mentors appear not to adequately understand the need for high-quality support for student teachers, that some do not understand the level students will be at during placement, or that at times the expectations of the school are inappropriately set”.

However, university staff are also sensitive to the reality that schools are stretched: one respondent notes that “schools are understaffed, underfunded and experiencing high pressure”.

A lead teacher for ITE

The upshot is that the MQuITE team is now calling for every school to have a teacher responsible for teacher education - both supporting early career teachers and the staff who mentor them.

Kennedy suggests that the little-used “lead teacher” role, created in 2021, would be the ideal route to create such a specialist: they could act as an intermediary to help prevent schools feeling overruled by universities or being concerned about student teachers’ preparedness when they arrive to undertake placements.

A key finding of the research is that there is no shared understanding of what the purpose of initial teacher education is: the report finds “a tension” between those who believe it is about equipping student teachers for “the here and now” and those who instead want to prepare students “for a whole career, the future of which is unknown”.

• Background: “Groundbreaking” study aims to hone teacher education
• News: Drop in Scottish teacher training applications “a red flag”
• Data: How many teacher education places went unfilled in your subject?

The sense is that schools want student teachers to hit the ground running and be classroom ready - but the university perspective is that it takes time to become a teacher, and graduates will not be fully formed, although they can be equipped with the skills essential for getting there.

This disconnect between schools’ and universities’ perspectives stuck out when university tutors were asked by MQuITE researchers what they did “particularly well” in terms of teacher preparation.

The university tutors said their strengths lay in developing “criticality, critical thinking, sustainability and social justice”; these themes were “widely referenced as important to the work of teachers, and things that HEIBTEs [higher education institution-based teacher educators] believe they do particularly well”.

What university tutors said they did less well were “day-to-day elements of classroom practice, such as planning, assessment and teaching and learning strategies for some subjects”. Some also identified classroom management and meeting additional support needs as areas “of further need” - in other words, the very areas that schools say should be more of a focus in ITE.

But Kennedy points out that teacher education is supposed to be a partnership, with both universities and schools nurturing student teachers’ skills - school placements, therefore, should be seen, as the report puts it, as “a site of learning”.

“When we talk about initial teacher education, we are often talking about university provision…actually, the model that we have is one of partnership where students learn in universities and in practice,” says Kennedy. There are even times when a university will see it as “the schools’ role to lead on certain kinds of learning”.

The key to that system working is communication between the partners - something that Kennedy believes would be made easier by having a lead teacher in every school responsible for teacher education.

‘We rely so heavily on mentoring...but we don’t resource it properly’

That person could also help to overcome the perception that universities are, at times, too laissez-faire when students are falling short. Kennedy counters that university tutors’ expectations of students will depend on the year they are in and the programme they are on, but says that this nuance sometimes gets lost - and could be highlighted by a lead teacher.

“If you’re a class teacher, and you have to deal with these different levels and different expectations - each placement, each student you have is out on a different programme - then I think finding where that threshold is is actually quite a difficult task,” she says.

“Whereas if we did have a school-based teacher educator, you would hope they would have better access to, and more understanding of, where people should be at certain times.”

Kennedy concludes that the current system is as good as it can be, given that it relies hugely on goodwill.

“The point here is not to identify someone to blame - it’s not that teachers are rubbish at mentoring and universities are rubbish at telling people what to do. It’s more about the fact that we rely so heavily on mentoring as a key aspect of teacher education, but, actually, we don’t resource it properly.”

One secondary headteachers’ group says that “having a member of staff with a dedicated focus on anything takes pressure off busy principal teachers and depute headteachers”, so having a lead teacher supporting students and probationers and their mentors “would be of massive benefit to schools”.

Peter Bain, a secondary head in Argyll and Bute who surveyed fellow members of the BOCSH group of headteachers about their experience of ITE on behalf of Tes Scotland, says: “Busy principal teachers and depute headteachers often have to spend a large amount of time coordinating placements, from paperwork to supporting mentors and student teachers, on top of often a full timetable and management responsibilities. Having a dedicated member of staff would undoubtedly help here, particularly if there is a student teacher or probationer with a lot of development needs.”

Schools with students from different universities

However, Greg Dempster, general secretary of primary school leaders’ body AHDS, is less enthusiastic. In primary schools this coordinating role is already undertaken by members of the school management team, and he questions who else would take this on, particularly in smaller primaries.

One issue that Dempster flags up - “the real difficulty managing students from different universities who have had very different course content and experience” - might be more straightforward to address, with a more sophisticated approach to student placement.

There are 11 teacher education institutions in Scotland and, when schools were asked in the study which universities they took students from, the data revealed “for the first time…just how complex the placing of students is for schools”.

For example, of the 45 respondents who indicated that they had had students from the University of Aberdeen, a sizeable minority also took students from the universities of Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow, among others.

The research report says: “As well as being demanding in terms of course familiarisation, the picture revealed here suggests that multiple relationships are having to be built up, making deep partnership working quite a significant challenge.”

Building relationships between schools and universities has also become more complicated, says Kennedy, given the advent of the Student Placement System (SPS). It is hosted by the GTCS - although the body confirmed this month that it will step back from running it in 2024 - having been launched in 2014 in a bid to ensure that all students in need of a school placement get one. However, an unintended consequence of this process, Kennedy says, has been an erosion of the relationship between schools and universities.

“The introduction of the Student Placement System came for a very good reason - because we had more teachers and not enough placements, and there were schools we knew just didn’t ever take students,” says Kennedy. Some of them did want to, she adds, but universities were often in the habit of using the same schools year after year.

“So, the Student Placement System stopped that and there were lots of good things that came out of it, but it has meant the direct links between university staff and schools are actually harder to maintain,” Kennedy explains.

There is optimism that when the SPS is renewed next year it can be replaced with a more sophisticated system that “addresses some of the weaknesses of the existing system” and “makes better use of new technologies and platforms”, as Margery McMahon, head of the University of Glasgow’s school of education, and chair of the Scottish Council of Deans of Education, puts it.

The reality is, however, that getting partnership working right between schools and universities in terms of teacher preparation is a longstanding issue.

Graham Donaldson’s seminal 2010 review of teacher education in Scotland called for “new and strengthened models of partnership among universities, local authorities, schools and individual teachers to be developed”, and for school-based placements to be in schools that met “quality standards”, with “the capacity to mentor and assess student teachers”.

However, with all the competing policy priorities in Scottish education in 2023 - including assessment reform and the overhaul of the Scottish Qualifications Authority and Education Scotland - it seems unlikely that initial teacher education will get the attention or funding it deserves.

At least the Student Placement System is due to be replaced in 2024 - although it is unclear who will take the reins from the GTCS. If part of the problem schools face is that they are overwhelmed by the sheer variety of courses and institutions they are drawing student teachers from, then surely a more sophisticated SPS could be part of the solution?

It is about time that solutions were found, with the MQuITE findings arriving more than 12 years after the Donaldson report first highlighted many of the same issues. But an updated SPS would at least be some sort of step in the right direction.

Emma Seith is senior reporter at Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith