Constructing the curriculum of (initial) teacher education: When should new teachers be encouraged to ask critical questions?

"As teacher training in the UK becomes increasingly school-based, largely as a result of government requirements, the question of whether and in what sense there is a useful place for ‘theory’ in initial teacher education remains a source of tension and confusion." Although this observation could have been made in response to the introduction and rapid expansion of School Direct under the Coalition government (a programme in which training places are allocated directly to schools who then choose whether or not to include universities in their partnerships), it was actually written more than twenty years ago (McIntyre, 1995). At that point, the dominant role of universities in initial teacher education was first challenged by government requirements that two-thirds of the time on any secondary-level PGCE programme should be spent in school. DonaldMcIntyre, an ardent advocate of school-based teacher education, approved that change: indeed he had persuaded the University of Oxford to