Teacher education, at a national and international level, is the result of historical, cultural and political developments and hence the structure and context of teacher education and the relationship between teacher education and national governments differs substantially between nations. Yet transformations in teacher education worldwide are the result of struggles for the curriculum and around pedagogy between different stakeholders. Transforming teacher education is at the core of educational policy-making all over the world today. Teacher education, especially at the initial or pre-service level, is regarded as a key lever in improving whole education systems. Traditional structures based around higher education institutions are seen by many governments as resistant to change and as barriers to improvement. Most governments therefore tend to intervene and change teacher education through the use of legal, rhetorical and economic tools that represent their ‘reformist’ vision, thus leading to increasingly tight control of the structure and content of teacher education.

While acknowledging the connection between states and schooling in the past, this symposium aims to understand the contemporary relations between government and teacher education in four national contexts: Australia, United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Norway. Based on theoretical and empirical studies, each paper discusses different aspects of this complex, complicated and interwoven relationship between policy and teacher education and the consequences of governmental interferences for the structure and contents of teacher education and the work of teacher educators. The common lens through which the relationship between policy and teacher education is studied in each national context is that of critical engagement in which the metaphor of struggle 9as in the struggle for the curriculum) underpins each paper. Questions are raised about who is in control of teacher education and who determines the structure and contents of it – and why (Apple, 2011).

The Australian paper is a theoretical contribution that takes a critical stance towards recent developments in Australia and beyond, forging a conceptual framework with which to understand present and future developments in the project of teacher education.

In the UK new alternatives are proposed based on theories of social entrepreneurship and funded by private philanthropy as well as the state. These challenges from alternative, reformist perspectives ask fundamental questions about teaching as a profession and teacher education as a form of higher education activity. The first UK paper look at the student teachers’ perspectives on the different routes into the profession created through market-based, government-initiated reforms. The second UK paper looks more closely at the concept of market in connection to a public service such as education and the ways in which the market intersects with the controlling instincts of a residual welfare state.

Over the last decades the Dutch governments has increasingly interfered in teacher education to improve the quality of teacher education but also to increase control of the teacher education curriculum, largely ignoring those who have to implement these changes in teacher education, the teacher educators. The Dutch paper addresses this complex policy problem.

In other contexts, such as in Norway and Germany, the challenges have proposed longer and more academic forms of initial professional preparation that claim to be focused on research. The different nature of these challenges and the different responses to them politically, scientifically and professionally are at the core of the Norwegian papers.

Apple, M. (2011). Education and power. (3rd edition). New York: Routledge.