Teacher Training in 1992: A Review and Discussion

For people who worked in colleges of education, in particular for academic staff, 1992 was the year of living nervously. Like Dad’s Army peering across the English Channel in 1939, lecturers cast their eyes towards Wellington to glean the first signs of the anticipated attack on teacher training. The signs were ominous and the threats very real. There was the Minister of Education’s supposed sympathy for an apprenticeship model of training, the State Services Commission’s well known position on award negotiations, backed by the power of the Employment Contracts Act, and as if that was not enough, capitalism’s Avenging Angels at the Business Roundtable had commissioned a report into teacher training. On top of all this the spirit of Thatcher’s enterprise culture had permeated the walls of The Colleges of Education so that there was talk everywhere of the need for entrepreneurial activities, activities which threatened to turn teacher trainers into pedlars of merchandise.As it turned out, the attack was a fizzer. In Gramsci’s terminology, albeit in reverse form, 1992 saw the war of manoeuvre over teacher training rather than the war of position. The full frontal attack, this time from the state against one of its own relatively autonomous institutions, never actually materialised. Civil society, in the form of the basic liberal discourse about the training of teachers, still breathes relatively easily, though, it must be said, with increasing difficulty. Award negotiations, while entering their final phase, had not by the end of the year reached anywhere near a conclusion. The Roundtable report has not been published, and is still a few months away, though no one knows why, or is not telling. Entrepreneurial activities have come, some have gone, but none has, as yet, swamped the basic purpose and meaning of teachers' colleges...