In Switzerland, the situation on the teacher labor market has been tense for several years, both at specific school levels and in certain cantons and regions (Denzler 2010). As in other European countries, education policy has taken various regulatory measures to address this situation and has launched various initiatives (Eurydice, 2018). These measures were geared to the working conditions of teachers and study models were developed to attract new target groups to the teaching profession (eg. lateral entry Models: Germer, Bárány, Gehrmann in this Symposium). Beside country-specific initiatives, interesting European parallels can be observed in the political discussion of and strategies against the teacher shortage (e.g. European Commission 2013). Teacher shortages may be a form of educational crisis. The question is to what extent such crises can represent a stimulus for innovation in teacher education. This is the starting point of the paper. Based on theoretical considerations on the governance of education policy processes and the actors involved (Abs et al. 2015), a critical discourse analysis (Jäger 2015), based on political strategy papers, legislative revisions and documentation of legislative hearings, is applied. In our Swiss study, we analyze regulatory measures and ask which measures are favoured by which actors to tackle the shortage of teachers. As in other European countries (e.g. Germany, Denmark, Sweden) (Eurydice, 2018), recent studies in Switzerland focus on lateral entry models (e.g. Bauer et al. 2017). Beside a few historical analyses on the educational policy governance of teacher demand (Criblez 2017) no systematic analysis of this discourse, i.e. of the political efforts to address the recent demand for teachers are available. Based on the Swiss discourse analysis and a comparative literature review of selected European countries, country-specific characteristics are presented in the context of European trends. The paper follows two main axes: 1. We ask to what extent innovation can actually be observed in dealing with the educational policy challenge of teacher shortages, and to what extent - also from a historical point of view - there is a great continuity in the policy measures. 2. Combining the Swiss study and the findings from other European countries (e.g. European Commission 2010) we ask whether aspects of international policy transfer (policy borrowing, lending, learning) (Philipps & Ochs 2003) can be described in the topic area of teacher shortage and lateral entry.

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