Recent statements by the European Commission (EC, 2007) and the OECD (OECD, 2005) have drawn attention to the quality of teacher education as a factor in improving educational outcomes generally. Whilst the imposition of standards or benchmarks in teaching and teacher education has proceeded at varying rates across Europe (EURYDICE, 2006), there is little international agreement as to how teacher education quality can be related to classroom performance, since there is a lack of evidence about causal connections between teacher education quality and teacher quality. Evidence from a recent Scottish research project (Gray, 2008, forthcoming) suggests that new teachers are often ambiguous as to whether their ITE experiences were of high quality, although many of these new teachers were rated by independent observers, pupils and colleagues as being 'very good' or 'excellent' teachers. A question thus arises regarding other possible indicators of TEQ, such as readiness to collaborate (Grangeat & Gray 2007), willingness to undertake continuing professional development (CPD), or engagement in wider lifelong learning activities. The symposium will address this question, which is highly relevant to teacher educators as they attempt to address policymakers' increasing concerns about quality across Europe. It is one of the preliminary activities of the SEQUETTE project, a proposed European collaborative study of teacher education quality in relation to science education. In the UK, a policy focus on quality assurance has resulted in OFSTED (England) and HMIE (Scotland) being charged with inspection of TEIs as part of an audit trail or feedback loop. Compliance with standards within ITT/ITE has thus been incorporated into certification schemes but does not in itself constitute a measurement of teacher education quality as it affects teachers in the workplace. This is an important connection to establish since otherwise accreditation and compliance processes within ITE become meaningless. The Eurydice report on quality assurance (ibid, p.70) points out that " neither initial or in-service teacher education is solely responsible for creating good teachers" but there is clearly a need to establish how they might make more of a contribution. The point here is that only teachers are in a position to judge whether their own professional education was (and is) of high quality. There needs to be participation in the development and application of the measurement process to ensure that any indicators which are developed are actually meaningful to the actors involved. As Ingvarson & Kleinhenz (2006) argue: Responsibility for the development and application of standards builds commitment to those standards, whereas imposition…leads to mere compliance Furthermore, the act of measurement itself is potentially threatening to teaching as a caring profession, if it models teacher performance as related only to pupil achievement in standardised tests, or if it results in additional reporting and audit functions which in themselves contribute nothing to teaching and learning. The symposium thus brings together teacher education researchers from diverse national contexts in order to explore this difficult issue. The presenters are involved in preparing a bid for the funding of a collaborative, trans-national project in the field of teacher quality, and the symposium will be an important element in testing out the central assumptions, ideas and methods of the project. Its themes of partnership, lifelong learning and action repertoires are all familiar within educational research but have not previously been combined to address the issue of teacher education quality and its indicators. The symposium is thus a valuable contribution to knowledge in this field.

The project will use naturalistic methods to collect data from practitioners involved in partnerships created specifically for the project and from existing school-university partnerships involved in teacher education and practice placements, across at least five European countries.

The project is at an early stage and the intention of the symposium is to explore and refine possible definitions of teacher education quality, and to build a concensus as to the types of indicators which would enable teacher education quality to be measured in terms of outcomes for practising teachers, as opposed to quality assurance indicators within institutions.