The Department for Education has ended its “focus” on school-led initial teacher-training in favour of a “pragmatic” approach that embraces university led courses, according to a senior official.

The new approach marks a major change in tone and follows years of attacks from Conservative education ministers on “so called progressive” university education departments that they have described as “The Blob” and accused of peddling outdated orthodoxy.

Now the DfE’s head of teacher supply, Ben Ramm, has said he wants to rebut the suggestion that the department focused exclusively on school-led teacher training.

“I think that was a narrative that was true for a number of years,” he said at a Westminster Education conference in London last week.

“I think that we have seen significant changes in the department over the last year or so.

“We now have an approach that I would describe as pragmatic rather than focused on any specific structural preference for school-led or university led-ITT.

“The secretary of state has been very clear in the speeches she has made that she recognises very clearly... the importance and the value of high-quality university involvement in teacher training, and I think that is very much a direction that we will see sustained and increased in the coming years.”

Applicants ‘vote with their feet’

The more conciliatory approach could be down to the practicalities of coping with a continuing teacher recruitment crisis. The DfE has not yet released the ITT census for September 2016, which will reveal how many would-be teachers are with each provider, but it is already clear that university-led training is still popular with graduates.

Last year, the National College for Teaching and Leadership told providers that they could recruit as many trainees as they wanted up to a national limit - and it was university teacher-training courses that were filling up the quickest.

“Despite all the publicity, applicants are voting with their feet and greater numbers are applying for higher education than school-based routes,” said John Howson, visiting professor at Oxford Brookes university. “I don’t think they [the government] have much choice - it’s what the market was telling them.”

‘The mood music’s changed’

James Noble-Rogers, executive director of the Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET), said: “The mood music certainly seems to have changed. The proof of the pudding will of course be in the eating.

“I am cautiously optimistic that the government is taking a more collegiate approach, and UCET will work constructively with them and give credit where it’s due. The country is facing a teacher supply crisis, and we all need to work together to improve both the recruitment and the retention of new teachers.”

This is an edited version of an article in the 10 March edition of TES. Subscribers can view the full article here. This week’s TES magazine is available at all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here