England’s ITE crisis is a wake-up call on academic autonomy

A question for academics in England: who among your colleagues have pretty much every aspect of their largest courses tightly controlled by the government?

Which courses must ensure 100 per cent fidelity to the ministry’s mandatory design and content to receive preliminary accreditation? Which courses then have to provide information about their financial model for the minister’s scrutiny and have lecturers’ notes, slides and reading lists approved by officials (on the understanding that some knowledge is prohibited from being taught)? Which courses are subject to on-site scrutiny by government inspectors and will have to endure further cycles of accreditation and scrutiny for years to come?

The answer is initial teacher education (ITE) courses, such as the Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE). Yet I wonder: did you know about this? You should.

Governments in the past – in England and elsewhere – have intervened in teacher education and come up with new ideas for improving courses, supporting course completions and induction in schools. Governments have the right and responsibility to do this for the school systems they fund. But what England has seen imposed since 2019 is like nothing it has seen before. It amounts to the biggest act of government overreach in England’s educational history.

The hijacking of control over curricula, ways of teaching, overall course design and the deployment of resources challenges fundamental principles of academic freedom and university autonomy. Some might say this tightly controlled environment prepares students to come under a similarly restrictive regime once they enter the teaching workforce. But it cannot be denied that the consequences of such regulation are highly damaging: a poor quality, state-mandated curriculum, devised without widespread consultation with stakeholders – including university-based teacher educators – that threatens to lower standards of teaching and, ultimately, standards of children’s learning.

This situation is the logical conclusion of the abolition, since the Conservatives returned to power in 2010, of all the public bodies (such as the Teacher Training Agency) that used to provide opportunities for deliberation, oversight and regulation of policy, with a direct line of accountability to Parliament.

In various other UK professions, there has been strong resistance to government control of training curricula. However, these have been coordinated by independent professional bodies that gatekeep entry to those professions, such as the Law Society and the General Medical Council (GMC). Teaching in England has never required a professional body’s licence to practise, and the closest it has had to a professional body, the General Teaching Council for England, was abolished in 2012.

Some universities tried to push back against the power grab. Oxbridge, UCL and the Russell Group entered into discussions with the relevant minister, Nick Gibb, special advisers from the Department for Education (DfE) and even from 10 Downing Street (such was the apparent importance of these reforms to Boris Johnson’s chaotic government). But in the end, the state prevailed and 26 civil servants were diverted from their usual responsibilities in the DfE to staff the new surveillance regime (hopefully none who could have been better left looking after the integrity of school buildings, for example).

Rather than pull out of ITE, the universities submitted to the department’s yoke. Except that not all succeeded in being accredited. About 20 per cent were rejected, at a time when shortages of teachers and rising rates of ITE non-completion were accompanied by criticism from newly qualified teachers that additional training mandated by the “Early Career Framework” was dull, repetitive and irrelevant to their situation.

Every parent in England should be interested in how this new cadre of teachers will teach their children. And everyone in English higher education should be interested in this unprecedented intervention by the state in day-to-day academic work.

Now it is exclusively the Department for Education that decides what your colleagues in Schools of Education teach and what readings they recommend. Will your subject be next?

Viv Ellis is dean of the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of the free, open-source book Teacher Education in Crisis: The State, the Market, and the Universities in England.