The development of the TEG (Teacher Education Group) resource was described in papers presented at ECER in 2007 and 2008 (Murray et al, 2008). This was a research capacity building initiative, designed to meet some of the needs of new and developing researchers within schools and faculties of education (see also Murray et al, 2009 forthcoming). The Teacher Education Group is a UK based team of researchers who were supported by four UK organisations in developing a major bibliographic resource for use by teacher education researchers. The initial resource identified 278 journal articles that reported research in and on teacher education that had been carried out in the UK between 2000 and 2006. The abstracts of these articles are presented within an online database that is openly accessible through the website of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (http://www.tlrp.org/teg). The database is searchable by date, author, journal and by research topic or methods (or any combination of these) and provides a link through to the original online articles. Since the resource was reported on at earlier ECER conferences a number of developments have taken place and these will be reported in the 2009 paper. The resource has been updated to include two more years of coverage, and two more journals have been sifted for the whole period since 2000. This has led to the inclusion of 82 more items. Three dissemination conferences were held during 2007/08 and were attended by teacher education researchers from many institutions across the UK. An evaluation questionnaire has been distributed and the analysis of these gives some insights into the ways in which the resource has been used. A number of ‘pedagogical walkthroughs’ are being written, designed to facilitate the effective use of the resource itself but also to facilitate links with other important resources that may be of use to teacher education researchers.

This paper draws reports on systematic coding of published literature and on evaluation questionnaires adminsitered to users of the TEG resource. The section on strengths and weaknesses of UK research in teacher education draws on a systematic review of the materials within the database.

An overview of the strengths and weaknesses of teacher education research in the UK will be put forward, as revealed by the patterns of research that is covered, especially in the light of recent negative comments about the quality of teacher education research made by the panel that has reviewed the quality of education research in the UK between 2001 and 2008. Finally, the paper will also consider the significance of a resource of this kind in a world of educational research where performance and quality measurements are increasingly significant. The relevance of this work for example to the EERQI project (European Education Research Quality Indicators), and to research assessment activities such as the UK’s 2008 RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) and the forthcoming REF (Research Excellence Framework).