Category: ITT

  • Regulation builds walls between different levels of education, but universities can build bridges

    Regulation builds walls between different levels of education, but universities can build bridges

    Education in England remains segmented by regulation.

    Schools operate within Ofsted’s education inspection framework and the statutory regimes of the DfE. FE colleges navigate the new suite of Ofsted frameworks alongside funding and skills accountability structures. Universities face OfS oversight, TEF metrics, and the expectations of the professional standards framework (PSF).

    Even within universities, initial teacher training (ITT) can sit slightly apart. It is tightly regulated, operationally complex, and often detached from wider higher education teaching development.

    This fragmentation undermines the very professional identity that all sectors claim to cultivate. Educators, whether in early years, FE, HE or the workplace, share core capabilities: pedagogical reasoning, reflective practice, evidence-informed decision-making and relational skill. Yet current inspection and quality structures often privilege compliance over coherence. The new regulatory climate – with Ofsted’s expanded reach and the Office for Students’ growing emphasis on outcomes – risks hardening rather than healing these divides.

    Connected teacher formation

    The development of educators should be understood as a connected professional landscape spanning all phases of education. Early-years practitioners cultivate curiosity and foundational learning; FE teachers integrate academic knowledge with technical and vocational practice; HE staff foster critical inquiry and disciplinary expertise; workplace trainers translate theory into competence and innovation.

    These contexts differ, yet the core professional capabilities – reflective practice, relational pedagogy, and evidence-informed judgement – are deeply aligned. It is this alignment that offers the potential for genuine coherence across the system.

    Yet policy and regulation often pull in the opposite direction. Current agendas, including the post-16 white paper and recent ITT reforms, prioritise measurable outcomes and workforce supply. While these imperatives matter, they risk reducing professional formation to a compliance exercise they privilege evidence collection over reflection and credentials over capability. Entrenching directive, overly prescribed curricula that constrain professional judgement rather than deepen it.

    The challenge for higher education is not to reject accountability, but to reclaim its meaning: to own, shape, and model what intelligent, developmental regulation could look like in practice for our educational professionals.

    Connecting silos

    Higher education institutions are uniquely positioned to reconcile accountability with professional growth across sectors. They already engage in ITT partnerships with schools, support FE teacher education through validated programmes, and offer HE teaching qualifications, from PGCerts to Advance HE fellowships.

    Yet in practice these streams often operate in splendid isolation, reinforcing sector barriers, constraining professional mobility, and limiting opportunities for genuine cross-sector learning.

    Recognising teacher formation as relational and interconnected allows universities to model genuine professional coherence. QTS, QTLS and HE-specific qualifications should not be seen as separate territories – but as mutually informing frameworks that share a commitment to learning, reflection and the public good. At their best, reflective and research-informed practices become the collaborative engine that drives dialogue and professional mobility to connect schools, FE and HE teaching, fostering shared inquiry, and generating innovation that travels across boundaries rather than staying within them.

    The central challenge is one of narrative and ownership. Policy discourse too often frames teacher education as a workforce pipeline and a mechanism for filling vacancies, meeting recruitment targets whilst delivering standardised outputs. While workforce priorities matter, they must not be allowed to define the profession. The new Ofsted frameworks for ITT and FE, and the emerging regulatory language in HE, offer a moment of reckoning: will these instruments shape teachers, or will teachers and universities shape them?

    Universities have the intellectual capital, research capacity, and civic role to do the latter. They can reposition teacher education as the means by which professional agency is restored. They can demonstrate that robust accountability can coexist with autonomy, and that inspection need not stifle innovation.

    As I’ve set out, ITT, education and training, and HE teaching frameworks share a foundational logic: reflective practice, evidence-informed professionalism, and a commitment to learner outcomes. Treating these frameworks as interdependent rather than siloed gives HEIs the permission to shape, not just satisfy, regulation.

    Bridging the gaps

    The spaces between sectors – the school-to-FE transition, FE-to-HE pathways, and workplace interfaces – are where professional formation is most fragile. Policy and inspection regimes often treat these spaces as administrative handovers, yet they are precisely where higher education can add value.

    Universities can convene cross-sector networks, support shared professional learning, and promote collaborative research that spans education from the early years to lifelong learning. In doing so, teacher education becomes both the hub and the bridge: a central space where insight, evidence and practice converge, and a connective route through which ideas, people and purpose move freely.

    When universities play this role with intent, they enable knowledge, skill and reflective practice to travel with educators, strengthening the coherence of teaching as a truly lifelong, connected profession.

    Looking forward

    Teaching is the connective tissue of education, yet current regulatory and inspection frameworks continue to partition the profession into sector-specific silos, limiting transitions and weakening shared professional identity. The post-16 white paper, ITT reforms, and evolving HE teaching frameworks present more than compliance obligations – they offer a pivotal moment to restructure teacher education towards collaborative, cross-sector and shared professional agency.

    HEIs are uniquely positioned to seize this opportunity. By bringing schools, FE, and HE into constructive dialogue, aligning teaching pathways, and engaging inspection regimes strategically, universities can model a profession that is both coherent and adaptive. In doing so, they can collectively lead the sector in addressing complex challenges, ensuring teacher education supports not just quality, but innovation, inquiry, and resilience across the system.

    The pressing question is this: if teaching is the thread that binds the system, will higher education step forward to unite the sectors, shape regulation, and demonstrate what it truly means to teach without borders?

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  • The trouble with the latest accreditation round for initial teacher education

    The trouble with the latest accreditation round for initial teacher education

    English teacher education has been the subject of ongoing and turbulent policy change for many years. But the radical shift in agenda instigated by the Department for Education (DfE) market review between 2022 and 2024 brought this change to another level. The policy instigated a reaccreditation process for all initial teacher education (ITE) providers awarding qualified teacher status.

    The Conservative government’s attempt at “delivering world-class teacher development” ended up decimating the landscape of ITE, leaving those of us left to pick up the pieces. Now DfE has opened a second round of the accreditation process – has it learned any lessons?

    What went wrong

    Stage 1 of the process the first time around included a written proposal of over 7,000 words outlining compliance with the new standards, including curriculum alignment to the ITE core curriculum framework. Additional details and evidence of partnership and mentoring systems and processes also had to be included. Successful applicants progressed to stage 2. Here, rigorous scrutiny of further preparation and plans began, with each institution being allocated a DfE associate to work with for a further twelve months.

    The additional workload this required stretched the capacity and resources of all education departments within higher education institutions. Academics were simultaneously delivering ongoing provision, continuing recruitment, and writing additional postgraduate (and for many undergraduate) revised provision – and many were under the threat of redundancy. All of the above, under constant threat of looming Ofsted visits.

    A previous Wonkhe article likened to the process to the Netflix series Squid Game, using the metaphor to describe the experience for existing ITT providers – meet the confusing demands and conflicting eligibility requirements, or you’re out.

    A significant number of providers failed to secure accreditation, either losing or giving up their status, with provider numbers reducing from 240 to 179.

    At the time the sector offered collegiate support, forming working groups to foster joint responses when collating the sheer volume of output required. Pressures surfaced including stress and anxiety caused by the increase in workload. Insecurity of jobs and the conflicting and at times confusing advice brought many individuals to the point of exhaustion and burnout.

    Squid: off the menu?

    You would therefore expect an announcement of the opportunity for providers to re-enter the market to be met with a sense of joy. Wouldn’t you?

    However, the new round is only for any lead provider currently working in partnership with an accredited provider. These partnerships are only in their first year and were encouraged by the DfE because of the “cold spots” created when thirteen higher education institutions failed to pass the previous process – despite having proven a history of quality provision.

    The creation of such partnerships added yet more stress and workload to all concerned. No legal advice on governance was provided. They proved incredibly complex to navigate, requiring long standing buy-in to make them workable and financially viable. As of yet no advice has been published of how to exit these partnership arrangements.

    Providers wishing to begin delivering ITT from September 2026 must meet the eligibility criteria. The window for the applications will be open for a much shorter period than the previous round, with the process and outcome to be completed 30 June 2025. This contrasts to the 18 months previously required for providers to demonstrate their “market readiness” in the previous round.

    Stage 1 of the new process will include a written submission of no more than 1500 words – remember, it was 7,000 last time – with applicants submitting a brief summary of their ITT and mentor curricula. In this short piece they will need to “demonstrate how their curriculum meets the quality requirements in the ITT criteria.” A window across March and April 2025 was open to complete and upload this portfolio.

    Stage 2, this time round, is an interview, where applicants “deliver a presentation to a panel, and answer questions further demonstrating how they meet the quality requirement.” Following both the written and verbal submissions, an assessment will be made and moderated by panels of ITT experts.

    For those still haunted by the lived experience of the first round of ITT accreditation, the greatly reduced stringency of the process would appear to make a mockery of the previous, highly controversial, demands and expectations.

    Like last time, success in the accreditation will require a demonstration of compliance with the expectations of the core curriculum framework (or from September, the ITTECF) along with further DfE quality requirements through submission.

    However, unlike last time, prospective providers will not be required to create extensive written responses, detailed curriculum resources or an extensive mentor curriculum (for which many of the requirements were axed overnight in the government’s announcement in November).

    Unbalanced

    How can the two contrasting timelines and expectations possibly be seen as equitable or comparable?

    In addition, how can we guarantee a smooth transition between lead partners and current accredited providers? Some of these partnerships involve undergraduate provision, established as a result of “rationalising” ITT provision. For those students only in year one of a three-year degree, how will this transition work?

    As a sector we recognise that the policy is aimed at meeting the government target of recruiting an extra 6,500 teachers this sitting parliament. And we welcome our peers back into the fold. Many of us are still reeling from the injustice of those colleagues being locked out in the last round (at the time all rated good or better by Ofsted).

    However, as NFER’s recent teacher labour market report pointed out, teachers’ pay and workload remain the highest cited reasons for ongoing difficulties in recruitment and retention. Neither of these things have been addressed by the new accreditation process.

    For those of us still clinging on for dear life, our confidence in the system is fading. One day, just like our stamina and resilience, it will evaporate all together.

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