‘Teaching could be a fantastic job but …’: three stories of student teacher withdrawal from initial teacher preparation programmes in England

Abstract

Retention in initial teacher preparation (ITP) and the teaching profession, in England and elsewhere, has been the subject of numerous articles in academic and professional journals. Whilst a number of common findings are beginning to emerge from research on this subject, notably on the causes of student teacher withdrawal, studies have tended to neglect the difficulties experienced by the individuals who have lived through the process of embarking upon and withdrawing from ITP programmes. Having conducted in‐depth interviews, the authors attempt in this paper to understand the experiences, emotions and decisions of three people who committed themselves to ITP, invested much energy and time, but in the end withdrew. The reasons for their decision are numerous and complex. The impact on each individual was considerable. The experience was painful.

Keywords:

• student teachers
• pre‐service teacher education
• dropout
• initial teacher preparation
• professional education
• career changers

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the valuable contribution to the broader research project of all members of the ‘Becoming a Teacher’ team (including Angi Malderez, Jane Healy, Godfrey Pell, Tom Roper and Peter Tomlinson) and all members of the project Steering Group. A special thanks to Christopher Day and the anonymous journal reviewers for their invaluable comments on previous versions of this paper.

Notes

1. We use the term ‘initial teacher preparation’ (ITP) to refer to what is described elsewhere as initial teacher training (ITT), initial teacher education (ITE) and pre‐service training. Our preference for using this term is explained elsewhere (Hobson et al., 2008, p. 1).

2. Despite our preference for the term initial teacher preparation over that of initial teacher training, for reasons of style we use the terms ‘student teacher’ and ‘trainee’ interchangeably to refer to those following different kinds of ITP programme.

3. Further details of the research design of the ‘Becoming a Teacher’ study as a whole are reported in Hobson et al. (2008, 2009b).