Leeds Beckett University, in association with the British Educational Research Association, invite you to participate in our inaugural international conference entitled Global Perspectives in Teacher Education: Challenging the Standard Education Model taking place on 26^th-27^th June 2025 at Leeds Beckett University, UK.

The conference will focus on a number of important themes related to the impact of globalisation and internationalisation on sustainable teacher education. The conference will consider ideas such as inclusion, sharing knowledge across the globe, curriculum and its impact on knowledge generation, globalising teacher education, developing evidence-informed practice and self-improving systems, diversity, global citizenship, and intercultural education. This conference will consider concrete solutions which support the UNESCO Education 2030 goals with the aim of allowing partnerships, networks and collaborations to be developed that will take forward some purposeful and real projects to develop solutions for the current recruitment and retention crises in teaching which will support the development and vision of high-quality sustainable teacher education across the world.

The conference is aimed at researchers, academics, consultants, practitioners, teachers, research students and professionals working in fields such as international, intercultural and comparative education, curriculum development, education policy and practice.

Keynote – Viv Ellis 

Designing new futures for teacher education: Learning from global experiences

England has an international reputation for hubris when it comes to polices for teacher education. The assumption has been that the rest of the world couldn’t do better than England’s ‘golden thread’ or that England’s PGCE is what education systems globally are crying out for.

English policy experiments that draw on other countries’ ideas tend to be exercises in cherry-picking and crude transplantation into the very different and, perhaps until fairly recently, toxic overall policy environment. Often, these transplanted ideas seem to take hold awkwardly, if at all, and rarely produce buds of genuine innovation that are meaningful.

What would it mean for England’s policy-makers to genuinely look outward and seek to understand not only ‘what works’ elsewhere but why the local policy ecologies and educational cultures support and promote the growth of good ideas?

In this presentation, I will offer some provocative scenarios of learning from global experiences in teacher education reform and what might need to happen in England to ensure that real policy learning takes place rather than merely picking some borrowed cherries or dismissing global experiences as irrelevant or inferior. These speculations will attend to experiences in the other parts of the UK as well as internationally. 

Keynote – Dominic Wyse

Teacher Education and What Works: A new frontier for ‘the reading wars’

Teacher education has been part of university education departments for more than a hundred years. The university concept of academic freedom therefore should have a bearing on the content of teacher education, in particular in the selection and promotion of the most relevant research to inform trainee teachers. In this talk I use the example of The Balancing Act Initiative, which aims to improve the teaching of reading and writing in early years and primary education on the basis of robust evidence. The research evidence that informs the Balancing Act challenges some recent developments in the control of the curriculum in teacher education in universities. Moves towards more control of teacher education content are being seen in a range of countries where the English language is dominant. Questions are raised in the talk about which evidence is selected, by who, and for what purposes. Reflections will also be offered on what England’s national curriculum review reveals about the use of the evidence base for the teaching of reading and writing, something which in time is likely to have an influence on curricula in teacher education.