In the neo-liberal education market in England, there are now a plethora of routes into teaching. The intention is to break the ‘producer capture’ of Higher Education Institutions that have traditionally been responsible for teacher education. Simultaneously, there is a concern to focus on the immediacy of the classroom and see teacher training as a craft rather than a theoretically inflected professional qualification. In England there is a policy framework that seeks to impose these changes (Maguire, 2014). In practice this means that the majority of trainee teachers choose either the Post Graduate Certificate of Education (the traditional university-based route); School Direct (SD)(salaried); a paid route largely based in schools, or School Direct (SD) (a hybrid version of these two models). Currently many policy stakeholders and government advisors privilege the School Direct routes (Horden, 2014). These imposed models are regarded as intrinsically ‘better’ as they allegedly offer a more ‘hands-on” practical approach towards classroom practice. This paper draws on a series of in-depth interviews with 12 trainee teachers: 4 are following the PGCE route, 4 are on the SD salaried, and 4 are on the SD pathway. We explore the trainees’ rationale for choosing their route and how each route is experienced We consider how they describe the advantages and disadvantages of their chosen pathway. We also investigate the extent to which they would advocate for their particular route as a good way to ‘become a teacher’.

Maguire, M. (2014) Reforming teacher education in England: ‘an economy of discourses of truth' in Journal of Education Policy, Vol. 29, No. 6, pp. 774- 784. Horden, J. (2014) The Logic and Implications of School-based Teacher Formation, British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 62, No. 3, pp. 231 -248.