When, in 2022, I planned a book on the crisis in teacher education in England, I thought it would be a niche book, directly relevant to the English education policy scene and more indirectly relevant to teacher education policy researchers internationally. Bloomsbury, thankfully, could see there would be a market for such a book and my co-authors and I worked at pace to produce the manuscript and get it peer reviewed. Then Bloomsbury themselves pulled out all the stops to the get the open access e-book out in time for 2023’s BERA conference. Teacher Education in Crisis: The State, the Market and the Universities was published in an Open Access e-book format as well as paperback. The e-book has now been downloaded over 2000 times and is available free by clicking here.
The principal audiences for the book were (and still are):
1. Teachers in England who, justifiably facing their own crises, likely did not know what was going on in the system that had produced them and that, according to multiple sources of evidence, regarded the system highly;
2. Education policy researchers internationally (particularly those with a focus on teacher education policy), because what has gone on in England is unique both in terms of the nature of its intent, its rhetoric, and its mode of enactment; 3. Higher education leaders in England and elsewhere – because my co-authors and I did not believe that Vice-Chancellors fully understood what was happening to their universities – or at least one corner of them.
While there had always partly been motive for us to provide a ‘warning to the curious’, the book soon became much more relevant to Australia in that respect. That’s not to say that Australia has seen a carbon copy of the English reforms since 2019, of course, but some of the tools of reform, including the rhetoric, have been very similar and continue to be so. As authors, we’ve been very pleased to hear how useful the book’s various chapters have been to Australian colleagues going through their own reform processes – within initial teacher education and more generally across higher education.
Viv Ellis 