This paper is situated within the Diversity in Initial Teacher Education (DITE) in Ireland national research project.  DITE explores the socio-demographic backgrounds, career motivations and experiences with diversity of applicants and entrants to primary and post-primary ITE at undergraduate and postgraduate levels for state-funded ITE programmes in Ireland. The focus of this paper is ITE applicants’ (and/or entrants, as relevant) social class backgrounds (formal categorisations), self-classifications and related explanations.

In the context of an important policy focus of widening participation in Irish higher education (HE), recently, there is an emphasis in research about what happens next to these groups, in terms of progression to postgraduate level, employment, and the professions, including teaching (HEA, 2015). While Ireland’s school populations significantly diversified through immigration during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years, our ITE and teaching populations have remained predominantly white, female, and of the majority ethnic and social class groupings (Authors, 2015, 2016). In Ireland’s latest national access plan (HEA, 2015), there is a commitment to improving the participation of national HE target groups in Irish ITE, including those from lower socio-economic groups. The small amount of research on social class in ITE in Ireland points to the over-representation of higher socio-economic and Farming groups (Greaney, Burke, and McCann 1987), especially amongst primary ITE populations (Killeavy 1998; Drudy et al. 2005), and of the Manual Skilled and Farmers groups at post-primary level (Heinz, 2013). The recent restructuring of Irish ITE has included the extension to four years for undergraduate programmes and two years for postgraduate programmes. Coinciding with this change, Authors (2015) identified a statistically significant decrease in those from lower socio-economic groups entering postgraduate post-primary ITE programmes between 2013 and 2014.

Research has shown that working class teachers can positively impact working class pupils through emphasising high expectations, questioning the role of education in reproducing class-based inequalities (cf. Maguire, 1999, 2001, 2005; Burn, 2001), and having more social justice-oriented teaching motivations than others (cf. Authors, 2017; Keane, 2016). However, research also suggests that working class students ‘battle’ their way through ITE and into the teaching workplace, experiencing significant discontinuities in joining the middle class teaching profession (cf. Maguire, 1999; 2001; 2005; Burn, 2001).

The need to continue tracking the participation of socio-economic groups in ITE over time is clear. For Hall and Jones (2013), class is an important and yet invisible force shaping teachers’ early professional experiences. Understanding their self-classifications and related explanations is also important given that pre-service teachers lack understanding about their class (and ethnic) positionality and implications for teaching diverse groups (Mueller and O’Connor, 2007; Allard and Santoro, 2006).

Specifically, we will address the following research questions:

1)      What are the social class backgrounds of ITE applicants, entrants and non-entrants in Ireland?

2)      What social class groups are over- or under-represented in relation to the Irish and the general HE populations?

3)      Do ITE application outcomes differ by social class background?

4)      How do ITE entrants self-classify in terms of social class categorisations, and how do they explain these self-classifications? 

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