John Tomlinson on a study of teacher training in Britain, France and the USA. Here is a book for our times: a study in three countries of the relationship between teacher education and the universities. An Englishman looks at France; a Frenchman at the USA and two Americans at England, with the whole introduced and rounded off by Harry Judge, who was also the interlocutor of France.

It is a notable addition to the Oxford Studies in Comparative Education although, as Judge points out frequently, it is the contrasts that are most telling. In France central government has tried to secure a new place for the universities in the training of teachers; in England it has tried to marginalise the universities (whatever the rhetoric); and in the USA a tradition of abhoring Federal intervention in education has left room for a spectrum of approaches. Yet in all three the relationship between the universities, the schools and the State powers in respect of teacher education is problematic. So the really interesting question presses in: why?

The structure of the book is refreshing. The authors select 1963 as the climacteric year and then write the story backwards and forwards from this date. I selected the same pivotal point for The Control of Education but am intrigued that it has resonance also in France and USA. When we are allowed time to educate beginning teachers as well as train them, comparative education must find a place; meanwhile academics and MA students will toil eagerly over this study and many in schools and the Department for Education ought to. For the stories are trenchantly instructive and the lessons humbling.

The Americans who viewed the story in England place a large measure of the responsibility for government’s sudden and violent reforms of the 1980s and ‘90s upon the complacency of those in the universities. After the apparent entrenchment of the universities in teacher training following the 1972 White Paper A Framework for Expansion and the subsequent closures and mergers of colleges as the economy deteriorated and the birth rate fell, (the universities’ share of the intakes tripled from one-tenth to one-third), those in universities failed to take the messages of the Ruskin Speech and the Great Debate that there was widespread concern about school education and that the quality of the teachers was central. “Only a few gloomy prophets foresaw how vulnerable the entire enterprise would prove to be”.

Having described in graphic and telling detail the story from the Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education to the Teacher Training Agency, the authors conclude that through “miscalculations and their passive political stance, (teacher educators) gave their implicit assent to severing the preparation of teachers from institutions of higher education. It may be that the reluctance of schools to play a larger role in preparing teachers - on the grounds that it might threaten the education of children - will help to preserve a role for higher education. In 1994, however, wrenched from its home of a century in higher education yet unwelcomed by those whom the government hoped would adopt it, teacher education in England appears to be on the verge of becoming homeless”.

I quote the passage because it is typical of the language and level of the analysis. It contains a kernel of poetic truth but by no means the whole truth. There are at least two flaws in the analysis. In looking only at the universities the authors are, in the 1960s and ‘70s especially, looking almost entirely at the preparation of teachers for secondary schools and via the PGCE at that. Hence their talk of the power of the “subject Barons” and hints of guerrilla warfare between them and the social scientists. But the universities had only one-third of the whole. The vast majority of primary school teachers and many secondary teachers were trained in the colleges and polytechnics.

Where colleges merged with universities their staff often met the implicit disdain of many in the universities for “education”. And those used to training for primary schools found the presumptions of secondary colleagues unfamiliar. It was not the case in the polytechnics. On top of this, from the late 1980s, came the emphasis in universities on research, driven by exercises in research selectivity connected to the funding mechanisms. By the time the Polytechnics were designated universities in 1992, there was a serious and dysfunctional mismatch between the paradigm of the research-based university and the practice-connected professional school. Thus from 1992 “the Universities” contained a much wider range of experience of teacher education and attitudes towards it than this study suggests.

It was the same government that willed the unitary university system, insisted on research selectivity and legislated for more school-based training. These issues and their roots in the sociology of knowledge and the politics of education needed more thoughtful examination.

The complacency and lack of political nous of teacher educators played their part, but the entrenched views of those in government and advising it were the predominant force. And we cannot yet know how far the whole re-formed University sector will be able to assert a changed view of teacher education.

The authors also conclude that teacher education in England was even more friendless than it appeared to be in either the United States or France. What was crucially different in those countries? The USA had A Nation at Risk (1983) to compare with The Great Debate in England. The various education reform programmes and interventions at Federal, State and local levels which followed have been unco-ordinated and with differing emphases,so that a single policy of reform of teacher education has not emerged. But different ways of training teachers, some with little connection to the universities, have.

And within the academy a tension remains between those who argue that research has done little for the practice of teaching and those, like the Holmes Group, who argue that it would if it were based in the Professional Development School - that is, if Schools of Education would change into what they have never been. The absence of a monolithic policy for teacher education in the USA prevents everyone being forced into the same mould simultaneously; but it is no protection from the same questions as have arisen in England.

And what of France? Related events of the sixties were driving the reforms but “on the surface at least policies toward teacher education appeared in the nineties to be moving in opposite directions in England and France”. In the 1980s new Institutes (the IUFM), based upon existing training institutions were set up throughout France and given the label (but not the title or juridical status) of university. Teachers of all kinds were to receive in them two years of training following a three-year university qualification. It looks therefore as though the relationship between teacher education and the universities has been settled and in a way that establishes the importance of the university to the enterprise. But the authors warn that the policy is new and may prove vulnerable under the right-wing government returned in 1993.

The book ends with a warning about the eye of the beholder. To the Frenchman, the United States looked like a jungle, diverse, luxuriant and unmanaged; to the Americans, England looked more like a zoo, caged, inflexible, docile; and the Englishman admired France as a circus, planned,skilful and under the control of a ringmaster. But the question of how to educate teachers for a whole nation had not been answered finally in any of them.

John Tomlinson is director of the Institute of Education, University of Warwick.