Peter Gilroy

A critical history of research assessment in the United Kingdom and its post‐1992 impact on education

This paper presents a critical overview of the way in which higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK have had their research activity subject to review. There have been six such reviews to date, the first two carried out by the Universities Grants Committee and, from 1992, by its replacement, the four UK higher education (HE) funding bodies (HE Funding Council for England, HE Funding Council for Wales, the Scottish HE Funding Council and the Department for Employment and Learning in Northern Ireland). The paper provides a broad outline of the key elements of the process, focusing on the two more recent research reviews and their impact on the subject of education, with the references providing specific detail for those interested in the minutiae of the reviews.

Evaluation and the invisible student: theories, practice and problems in evaluating distance education provision

Making sure that a higher education distance learning course meets student expectations is critical to ensuring the quality of the student experience. Judging whether a course delivers to its promise is a particular challenge when the course is delivered by distance learning and there is no regular face‐to‐face contact with students, the more so when courses are faced with alternative conceptions, and external audits, of quality. The paper identifies the contested nature of quality, examines models of evaluation, relates them to existing forms of evaluation facing education courses, and offers an alternative constructivist approach based on the notion of a service template.

Collecting Data in the Information Age Exploring Web-Based Survey Methods in Educational Research

51 T tRISSt project is a major UK, cross-institutional scoping study of the ICT skills of staff in higher and further education institutions, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). The tRISSt project is set against a background of recent UK government education policy initiatives and the technological imperative of globalisation, both of which have created a need for all levels and categories of staff to possess a high level of ICT skills. The tRISSt project has three main objectives:

Teacher Education in Britain: a JET symposium with politicians

ABSTRACT This paper reports on a symposium with the participation of the editor and deputy editor of the Journal of Education for Teaching and two senior British politicians on the current situation of teacher education in Britain. Topics discussed include: control and accountability, the influence of political and bureaucratic forces, the threat from unelected, non‐responsible bodies, threats to institutions, to the links of teacher education with higher education and the threat of the deskilling of the teaching professions. A concluding section considers the possibility that the policy of the Government is failing through its own structural defects and the possibility of the professions subsequent recovery.

The commercialisation of teacher education: teacher education in the marketplace

The three ‘Rs’ of teacher education in the twenty-first century will be the need to recruit, retain and re-train teachers. These three issues had been seen in embryo towards the end of the twentieth century. As with other ‘caring’ professions, such as nursing and social work, the marketisation of the professions will impact to such an extent that all three ‘Rs’ will be under pressure. It will prove increasingly difficult to attract graduates into the profession, given the combination of relatively low pay, the prohibitive cost of housing and the high student debts that will be incurred (the more so once the break is taken off the full market costs of undergraduate provision being linked to student fees). An indication of the growing problems with recruitment could be seen in the first years of the century with a new focus on re-training classroom assistants coupled to the drive to attract mature recruits from industry with an appeal to their sense of vocation. Retaining teachers after their third or fourth year will prove impossible, as the skills they had gained were at a premium in the commercial world. And as for re-training teachers—there is little or no motivation for teachers to sign up to courses that are expensive in both time and money. By 2010, the baby-boomers of the 1940s, who accepted the low pay of the caring professions as a trade off against the community’s respect for those who answered a vocational call, had long since retired. Much the same could be said of those in the university sector charged with recruiting and re-training teachers: the majority were retiring and not being replaced in the first few years of the twenty-first century, their posts instead being filled by staff who could generate more income more quickly. A sign of the times was the closure of a number of university education departments, including in 2003 the oldest school of education in England. This process was hastened by the decision to transfer to the newly formed TTA first the money earmarked for ITE, second HEFCE’s INSET funds, and then in 2008 the HEFCE education research funds. The majority of this funding was then transferred to the schools. At this point the majority of universities decided that there

International teacher education: changing times, changing practices

In this issue of JET your editor finds himself in the odd position of being both the editor of the journal and the guest editor of the special issue. With our previous special issues I have used my editorial as an opportunity to introduce the guest editor, but it seems strange, to say the least, to introduce myself, so I will pass over that element of an editorial for a special issue in silence. With the 40th volume of the journal JET has reached the milestone of being in continuous publication for 40 years, first as the British Journal of Teacher Education in 1975 and from 1981 as the Journal of Education for Teaching: International Research and Pedagogy. As a mark of the quality of papers being offered to the journal over this period there has been a need to move from three to four and now five issues per volume. In thinking about how to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the journal I found myself browsing through back copies of JET. I was taken with the very first paragraph of the first issue’s editorial.

Pre-service student teachers and their programmes: the Rite de Passage from student to master teacher

Governments, and even some school and head teachers, seem to expect fledgling, newly qualified teachers to be, in effect, fully fledged the minute they walk into the classroom fresh from their teacher preparation programme. The multi-cultural research that Anna Elizabeth du Plessis and Eva Sunde report on identifies the importance of the working partnerships between higher education providers and schools so as to help teachers at the start of their profession come first to understand and then manage the complicated teaching situations they will find themselves in once they start their career. Of course, what might be called monist teacher education programmes (those based totally in schools) might appear at first not to require the development of the partnerships that typify the dualist programmes which involve both schools and universities. To adopt such a position would be to ignore, amongst many other factors, the points made by research regarding the need for beginning teachers to feel at home in their school and to ‘belong’ to the profession. These are two elements that both schools and providers might well need to consider more formally as they go beyond a relatively superficial induction programme. Issues surrounding the problem of readiness-for-the-job is the focus of the paper by Zulaikha Mohamed, Martin Valcke and Bram De Wever. They begin by examining what is understood by the concept of teacher competencies in eleven different countries. These international competencies are then compared to the teacher education programmes that presumably have to take some or all of them into account in identifying successful graduates of their programmes. As before, the assumption underlying such competencies is that a teacher education programme can produce what might be termed the finished product straight off their assembly line, an assumption that only has to be voiced for its naïvete to be recognised. After all, given the open-ended nature of teaching such that even experienced teachers continue to learn about teaching it is nonsensical to assume that meeting a set of competencies will in and of itself transform the novice student into the master teacher. Chris Wilkins’ research spotlights a group of student teachers whose concerns are often noticeable by their absence. It is perhaps natural to think of student teachers as young, fresh from their undergraduate programme and so aged between 21 and 22. However, there is another group of student teachers that need to be considered, those who join a teacher education programme after having moved from a previous career. These Wilkins identifies as ‘high status, elite, professionals’ who clearly have rather different needs than their younger and less worldly-wise classmates as they move from having high status as an expert in their previous career to being a lowly novice student teacher. A key skill that this group of students makes use of to cope with the difficulties they meet on their programme and in particular in school is their ability to make use of the effective forms of resilience they developed in their previous career. However, the reasons why this group of students who appear to have the psychological tools to survive moments of crisis on their programme are in fact less likely to complete their teacher education programme remain unclear, although Wilkins does suggest possible answers to this puzzle to consider as an agenda for further research.

The Revolutions in English Philosophy and Philosophy of Education

Abstract This article was first published in 1982 in Educational Analysis (4, 75–91) and republished in 1998 (Hirst, P. H., & White, P. (Eds.), Philosophy of education: Major themes in the analytic tradition, Vol. 1, Philosophy and education, Part 1, pp. 61–78. London: Routledge). I was then a lecturer in philosophy of education at Sheffield University teaching the subject to Master’s students on both full- and part-time programmes. My first degree was in philosophy, read under D. W. Hamlyn and David Cooper and, given their interests, inevitably emphasized the philosophy of language, in particular the work of Wittgenstein in this field. When I subsequently turned my attention to the philosophy of education it seemed obvious to me that there were serious problems with Professor Peters’ approach to language, and I had particular difficulties with his approach to criteria, meaning theory and what seemed an odd interpretation of a transcendental argument. This article thus set out to show that the then dominant form of philosophy of education seemed not to take account of developments in the philosophy of language that preceded Professor Peters’ early work by at least a decade and which cast serious doubt on the enterprise as it was then understood. As the articles in the 1998 collection indicate, I was not alone in thinking there was something amiss, although at the time I seemed to be ploughing a somewhat lonely furrow. In revisiting this early article some 30 years after it was first published I have found to my surprise that there is little I would now change, although I have been forcibly reminded of the very lively discussions Professor Peters and I had over these issues. The fact that there is little I would now add to, or subtract from, my critique is in itself a telling comment on the enduring and influential legacy of the approach to the philosophy of education that Professor Peters championed so powerfully.

The Universities Council for the Education of Teachers: The Facilitator's Tale

Mary Russell, the sole full time member of staff of the Universities Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET) since the sixties, recounts its development as the major organisation of teacher educators in UK. Starting as a small grouping of senior professors in the sixties it has grown to many times its first size and has become more inclusive with the possibility that it may grow further. Further growth may demand a change in function and modes of working. Nothing is currently envisaged. Much of the time of the UCET in the last decade and a half has been spent defending teacher education against ill informed Government attacks. As a result the organisation has had to assume a more combative stance in recent times. Recently it has been a prime mover in developing links among all professions in UK, most of whom are similarly beleaguered.

‘Perspectives on evidence-based knowledge for teachers: acquisition, mobilisation and utilisation’

Your editor was for some years a school-teacher in England and rarely, if ever, had access to educational research which could identify a firm evidence base for practice. There was some mention in the late 1960s in the staffroom of something called the Humanities Curriculum Project, funded by the Schools Council and fronted by a Professor Stenhouse, but unfortunately at the time this was not something your editor was introduced to (see Elliott and Norris 2011). It may be that the way important research passed unnoticed by your then school-teacher editor is not untypical of the way in which educational research and practice seem to be strangers one to the other and has led to many publications on the so-called theory/practice gap in education, not least in JET itself. The present Special Issue of JET provides a set of papers commissioned by Professors Linda la Velle and Maria Assunção Flores that address the links between educational research and classroom practice. The contributors focus on the concept of evidencebased knowledge for teachers, in particular how such knowledge might be acquired and then used in the classroom. This approach is very much in the tradition of JET in identifying and dealing with an important current issue in a clear and helpful way.