In 2007 the European Commission (2007) outlined proposals for improving the quality of teacher education within member states. The Commission’s aspiration for high-quality teaching and training resonates with domestic British policy in the belief that economic competitiveness in the future to create more jobs through sustained growth depends crucially on systems of education and training (DfES, 2006). A large part of the rhetoric of the government has been that the training of young people in the UK has been inadequate (OECD, 2007) and that a part of the blame for that rests with teachers in the further education sector (post-16 institutions predominantly for apprenticeship and skills training) who until relatively recently (FENTO, 1999) were not subject to the same set of systems and accountabilities as teachers in primary and secondary sectors. In the past programmes of teacher education were accredited by universities or by awarding bodies (City & Guilds and EdExcel) and teachers in the sector were not legally required to engage in a programme of formal training. There is now a mandatory requirement for staff in the further education (FE) sector to have a teaching qualification that is endorsed. This requires a programme of training that is subject to inspection by the government through the office for standards in education (Ofsted). A suite of licentiate qualifications designed to meet the various and different professional needs of those in teaching or training situations has also been introduced. Teacher education has been refashioned as a technical-rational process in which ‘trainees’ are expected to model ‘best practice’ and are assessed against a lengthy set of national standards (LLUK, 2007). The change indicates compliance with a policy direction that has been extensively critiqued (for example, Coffield et al 2007; Malcolm & Zukas, 2002) because of the negative effects on the sector of dominance by funding, targets, initiatives, planning and inspections. In a companion piece (Lawy & Tedder 2009) we suggested that there has been a paradigm shift in the world of FE teacher education in the last few years, with the formal curriculum factorised into a set of standards and constructed as a programme of strictly controlled and managed teacher training. In this paper we draw upon the full findings from our research that was completed in December 2008. We adopt a critical case-study approach in which we challenge the performative frameworks that so often inform government policy in lifelong learning.

The research comprised a study of the impact and efficacy of individual learning plans (ILPs) and mentoring within the new teacher education and training programmes in the further education sector in the South West of England. The project was part of a series funded by the UK government via Centres for Excellence in Teacher Training (CETTs). The methods comprised semi-structured interviews with a number of trainees, teachers and managers who could offer contrasting perspectives on their participation in contemporary training. Twenty-eight interviews were undertaken in the early months of 2008; the research team collected rich qualitative data from ten trainees, from nine teacher educators who fulfil roles as tutors and/or mentors and also from nine managers, some working in FE colleges and some in other community organisations. All the interviews were transcribed and analysis undertaken with concern for analysis of content (Elliott, 2005; Alheit, 2005).

We follow a discussion of specific issues of practice related to the use of ILPs and mentoring with discussion of some of the key themes that emerged from our interrogation of the data. This includes consideration of different and contested notions of mentoring and the meanings associated with it together with issues of identity and professional formation. We consider the implication of an approach to teacher education practice that is founded upon a set of assumptions about subject pedagogy. Such an approach would move beyond a compliance culture and the performative achievement criteria that underpin it to an approach that is both critical and reflexive which opens up possibilities for a discussion about practice rather than closing-off the possibility by pre-framing the essential criteria.