Initial teacher education programmes (ITE) in Scotland must all be accredited by the General Teaching Council for Scotland, with the expectation that the content of each programme will, ‘to prepare student teachers to become competent, thoughtful and reflective and innovative practitioners’ (GTCS, 2019, 1.2) confident to teach in any part of Scotland. This generic approach is premised on preparing teachers for schools in urban areas, where the majority of the Scottish population lives. In urban areas the majority of classes in primary schools are in single year groups, with few multigrade classrooms. This means that ITE programmes provide little preparation or practicum experience of multi-grade teaching. The University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) provides ITE programmes across the rural north and west of Scotland, where there are large numbers of smaller schools and multi-grade classrooms. To prepare new teachers for practice these programmes have a greater emphasis on pedagogies and practicum experience to develop knowledge and skills for teaching in diverse multi-grade classrooms. This paper explores the space between the pedagogies taught in initial teacher programmes in Scotland and focus of early career teachers on the resources available to them in multi-grade classrooms. It builds on the results of research carried out in the University of the Highlands and Islands between 2018 and 2020, as part of the SCDE Attainment Challenge Project (SCDE, 2021), where one of the key findings was that early career teachers are more comfortable planning their teaching through the resources available to them than pedagogical approaches and preferred to work with particular schemes that structured teaching for them. Research to explore this point with graduates teaching in multi-grade classrooms has confirmed these approaches and identified a series of questions for initial teacher education programmes that suggest a focus on resources (Misimanga, 2019) would better prepare teachers for multi-grade classrooms.

General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS), 2019 Guidelines of the Accreditation of Initial Teacher Education Programmes in Scotland. Available online: https://www.gtcs.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/ITE-Programme-Accreditation-Guidelines.pdf Msimanga, M.R, (2019) Managing the use of resources in multi-grade classrooms, South African Journal of Education, 39(3). 1-9 Scottish Council of Deans of Education (SCDE), (2021) SCDE Attainment challenge Project: Developing pedagogies that work for Pre-service and Early Career Teachers to reduce the Attainment Gap in Literacy, Numeracy and Health and Wellbeing. Available online: http://www.scde.ac.uk/projects/scde-attainment-challenge-project/ Scottish Government, 2021, Rural Schools in Scotland: definition. Available online: https://www.gov.scot/publications/rural-schools-in-scotland-definition/