Policy rhetorics and resource neutral reforms in higher education: their impact and implications?

Abstract

As higher education (HE) comes under increasing pressure from policy-makers, nationally and internationally, to contribute more directly to economic development, tensions between more traditional missions of universities and their more recent entrepreneurial makeovers create major dilemmas for academic staff regarding their roles and responsibilities. Using the lens of professional responsibility and accountability, the paper takes Initial Teacher Education as an instrumental case study to illustrate how these tensions, in terms of policy documents, and perceptions of teacher educators unfold. Analysis strongly suggest that when external prescription is increased, and reforms under-resourced, pressures for accountable conformist compliance render the exercise of professional responsibility extremely difficult if not impossible, compromised rather than finding ‘legitimate compromise’. The paper argues that HE has significant lessons to learn from this case while signalling that current challenges within teacher education are already becoming a gauntlet that the entire HE community needs to consider seriously.

Keywords:

• placements
• educational policy
• teacher education
• accountability
• accreditation

Acknowledgements

We are most grateful to the editors and the reviewers for their valuable feedback on an earlier version of this paper. Our gratitude also to our informants, without whose insider accounts this work would be impossible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The term re-accreditation is used here for the following reasons. The Teaching Council, established in 2006, first began the piloting of re-accreditation of existing ITE programmes as part of its legislative remit (Government of Ireland 2001). By the time eight ITE programmes had been re-accredited in 2012, it was necessary for all ITE programmes to be accredited ab initio due to major policy and structural reforms.

2. The existing three-year Bachelor of Education programme preparing primary teachers was extended from September 2013 to four years, while consecutive programmes of one-year duration were to be extended to two years from September 2014. These two-year programmes have become level 9 Masters' programmes.

3. These percentages were established by direct contact with the interviewees or a similarly prominent person in their institution.