Blog post Part of series: BERA Conference 2025

Initial teacher education: Current directions in times of global disruption

Babak Dadvand, Senior Lecturer at La Trobe University Jo Lampert, Professor of Teacher Education for Social Transformation at Monash University Clare Brooks, Professor of Education at University of Cambridge 8 Sep 2025

Teacher shortages, political instability, emerging global crises and the aftermath of the pandemic have created significant pressure on education systems across the world. In response, initial teacher education (ITE) policy is undergoing accelerated reform in many countries. These reforms aim to fix workforce shortages or improve teaching quality. But if not undertaken with a broader vision about the intellectual, ethical and democratic purposes of education, they risk narrowing what teacher education needs to contribute to.

This blog post explores the implications of current ITE reforms, and questions where teacher education is heading. It focuses on three examples of national reform:

the impact of teacher shortages in Australia
moves towards standardisation and school-led models in England
the rise of market-based alternatives to university-led ITE in the United States.

These case studies illustrate a broader global trend: in times of disruption, ITE is being redefined in ways that prioritise short-term accountability over long-term professional and social commitments.

Across national contexts, concerns are being raised about the narrowing of the intellectual and ethical scope of ITE (see Dadvand et al., 2025). Rather than supporting teachers to navigate complexity and promote equity, many reforms reduce ITE to a form of technical training.

Australia: Addressing shortages, sidelining equity?

In Australia, a predicted shortage of more than 4,000 teachers by 2025 has led to policies that expand alternative entry pathways into teaching. These changes are often presented as practical responses to staffing pressures, but they may overlook the importance of social justice in quality teacher education (Lampert et al., 2025).

Recent reforms have focused heavily on ‘evidence-based’ practice and classroom management skills. While useful, narrowing the focus of ITE to a subset of skills using selective evidence can push aside the broader knowledge and values teachers need to support students from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds. Such an approach risks reinforcing, rather than challenging, existing inequalities in education.

‘Narrowing the focus of ITE to a subset of skills using selective evidence can push aside the broader knowledge and values teachers need to support students from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds.’

England: Standardisation and the erosion of professionalism

In England, reforms have focused on consistency and ‘quality’ through national Teacher Standards and the Core Content Framework. These reforms aim to bring conformity, and in doing so can narrow the definition of professionalism to specific behaviours.

By prescribing what new teachers must know and do, these frameworks limit professional judgment and reduce space for critical reflection. Standardisation may bring uniformity, but often at the expense of responsiveness to local needs and teacher autonomy (Brooks, 2025).

Combined with the shift to school-led teacher education, this has reduced the role of universities. While schools offer valuable hands-on experience, the diminished university role raises concerns about the loss of theoretical depth, understanding research-informed practice in its complexity, and space outside of schools to explore education as a broader social and ethical endeavour.

United States: The marketisation of teacher preparation

In the United States, the emergence of new graduate schools of education (nGSEs) represents a market-driven alternative to traditional university-based ITE programmes. These non-university providers, authorised to license teachers and confer degrees, have gained prominence by responding to reform narratives that position public education as ‘in crisis’.

Initially celebrated as agile disruptors, many nGSEs have struggled to demonstrate long-term sustainability (Keefe, 2025(. Their emphasis on efficiency, outcomes and workforce readiness aligns with broader neoliberal reforms in education. The proliferations of these programmes also raise important questions about the depth, rigour and ethical commitments of teacher education (Cochran-Smith et al., 2017).

Conclusion: Reclaiming the purpose of ITE

What connects these national cases is a common tension: how to respond to global disruptions without losing sight of the broader purposes of teacher education. Reforms driven by urgency and accountability can crowd out the slow, complex work of preparing teachers to engage with diversity, promote equity and navigate uncertainty.

Rather than treating ITE as a technical policy problem, there is a pressing need to reclaim its intellectual, ethical and relational dimensions. In the face of global challenges, from teacher shortages to rising inequality, we must ask not only how to prepare more teachers but what kind of teachers we need, and what kind of systems will support their development.

References

Brooks, C. (2025). Content frameworks: New forms of accountability and standardisation in initial teacher education. In B. Dadvand, J. Lampert, & C. Brooks (Eds.), Preparing teachers for social change: Teacher education at a crossroad (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003513841

Cochran-Smith, M., Baker, M., Burton, S., Chang, W. C., Cummings Carney, M., Fernández, M. B., … & Sánchez, J. G. (2017). The accountability era in US teacher education: Looking back, looking forward. European Journal of Teacher Education, 40(5), 572–588. https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2017.1385061

Dadvand, B., Lampert, J., & Brooks, C. (Eds.). (2025, forthcoming). Preparing teachers for social change: Teacher education at a crossroad (1st ed.). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003513841/preparing-teachers-social-change-babak-dadvand-jo-lampert-clare-brooks

Keefe, E. S. (2025). The rise (and fall) of new graduate schools of education in the United States. In B. Dadvand, J. Lampert, & C. Brooks (Eds.), Preparing teachers for social change: Teacher education at a crossroad (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003513841

Lampert, J., McPherson, A., & Wilkinson, J. (2025). Teacher education reform and the reproduction of social inequality. In B. Dadvand, J. Lampert, & C. Brooks (Eds.), Preparing teachers for social change: Teacher education at a crossroad (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003513841

Babak Dadvand, Dr

Senior Lecturer at La Trobe University

Dr Babak Dadvand is a Senior Lecturer in Teacher Education at La Trobe University. His research centres on equity and social justice, with a focus on preparing and supporting teachers in underserved and hard-to-staff schools. He has led projects on career-change pathways into teaching, teacher readiness, and the role of school-university partnerships in sustaining educators. His current work explores school-community engagement models that support mutual learning and respond to local challenges. Babak is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge book Preparing Teachers for Social Change: Teacher Education at a Crossroad. He advocates for teacher education that is intellectually rigorous, ethically grounded, and attuned to global challenges.

Jo Lampert, Professor

Professor of Teacher Education for Social Transformation at Monash University

Jo Lampert is Professor of Teacher Education for Social Transformation in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Australia. She co-leads the Education Workforce for the Future Impact Lab. Jo has worked in teacher education for 25 years researching how teachers can be prepared to address educational inequalities in the hardest-to-staff schools.

Clare Brooks, Professor

Professor of Education at University of Cambridge

Clare Brooks is Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge. Following her experience as a teacher of geography in east London, her research interests are still geographical, specifically in spatial justice and teacher education. She has recently been engaged in an international research project on high-quality initial teacher education at scale, the results of which have been published by Routledge. She has also worked to redefine quality as a keyword in initial teacher education (as part of the Keywords in Teacher Education series with Bloomsbury). She developed her interest in the quality and development of teacher education following her recent experience in leadership positions including Pro-Director for Education at the IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, as well as previous terms as Head of Department and Head of Initial Teacher Education, and as Director of the Research Centre on Teacher and Early Years Education. She is particularly interested in how...