Across and beyond Europe there remains significant pressure to improve the quality of teacher education. Set within a global meta-narrative driven in part by the OECD (2005), the message is that ‘Teachers matter’. This meta-narrative, played out in an increasingly neo-liberal context, has led governments across the globe to focus more keenly on ways of measuring and accounting for the quality of initial teacher education (ITE). In many national contexts, this drive to measure and account for quality, underpinned by what Lewis et al., (2020, p. 737) call ‘alarmist rhetoric’, has often engendered the imposition of simplistic ‘standards-based’ approaches, increasing surveillance of teacher education (in the US, England and Australia in particular (Murray et al., 2019) and a move towards highly regulated and specified content (e.g. the ITT Core Content Framework in England (DfE, 2019)).

It is against this global policy context that the Measuring Quality in Initial Teacher Education (MQuITE) project emerged in Scotland. At the time of its inception (2017) a ‘crisis narrative’ was beginning to take hold, stemming from a parliamentary review of ITE which concluded that standards of student teachers’ literacy and numeracy needed to be higher. Additionally, it posited that ITE programmes needed to do a better and a more consistent job of supporting student teachers to work with pupils with additional support needs (ASN) (Scottish Parliament, 2017). At the same time, the Scottish Government was holding education to account via its ‘National Improvement Framework’, and there emerged a need for greater evidence of quality in ITE across the Scottish system. The MQuITE project was established to support this evidential drive. Running for six years from January 2017 to December 2022, funded by Scottish Government, and supported by the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS), MQuITE included investigators from all 11 Scottish ITE providers. This collaborative venture provided a unique opportunity for teacher educators to ‘speak back to narratives of crisis’ (Churchward & Willis, 2019, p. 260).

The project had two key questions:

1. How can quality in ITE be measured in a Scottish, context appropriate way?
2. What does this measuring tell us about aspects of quality across different ITE routes in Scotland?

Following an extensive literature review (Rauschenberger, Adams & Kennedy, 2017), the project team developed a contextually appropriate framework (Kennedy et al., 2021) which acknowledged the need to interpret Scottish political, cultural, social and educational contexts within global meta-narratives. This meant eschewing performative, top-down, imposed, and narrow measurements of individual teachers and programmes, instead proposing a nuanced framework containing a number of different ways to identify quality.

Importantly, the project sought to identify system-level quality, rather than measure individual programmes or providers which might potentially create divisive league tables of provision. We approached the project through a ‘vernacular globalisation’ lens, sensitive and sympathetic to local policy and culture (see Kennedy et al. 2021). The project was thus oriented as a research and development opportunity, rather than purely as a means to gather empirical data in a de-contextualised way.

This paper looks at the outcome of that system-level health-check, in terms of both substantive and procedural learning. We learned lessons not only about the health of ITE in Scotland, but also about how engaging in a project such as MQuITE could enable productive dialogues between and across the range of stakeholders involved in teacher education. Broadly speaking, therefore, this paper answers the question ‘what key learning has emerged from the MQuITE project’, with a view to identifying system-level learning that we anticipate will be of use to other countries seeking to explore the quality of their own ITE systems.

Our approach was framed, broadly, by a desire to engage explicitly in vernacular globalisation (Appadurai, 1996), that is, to mediate global narratives with due regard to local context. This approach was enacted through the creation of a contextually appropriate framework, based on the work of Feuer et al (2013). This guided the direction for data collection which was primarily through an annual survey of 2018 and 2019 ITE graduates (1551 responses from 572 individuals across the 5 years of data collection). This was supplemented by a survey of school-based (n=229) and university-based (n=150) teacher educators in 2018 and nominal group technique interviews with school leaders and mentors in 2022. Here we report key findings from analysis of the entire data set. We also report on key learning about the process as charted in the final report to the Scottish Government. This paper includes insight into how we made decisions to adapt and amend the project in line with the ever-changing policy context, and how we consciously (and sometimes unconsciously) impacted on policy and practice as findings emerged. Key here is the belief that across-country research needs to be more than a simple gathering of data: key to development here is the generation and identification of participant learning so that ongoing shifts in the quality of ITE might not simply sit as distant to teacher-educators but is instead embedded in their working and professional lives, developed through ongoing dialogue with key stakeholders.

Analysis of the entire dataset suggest that at system-level, ITE in Scotland is in good health. Using the health analogy, the findings point to a need to move from a deficit model of ITE (that is, ITE is ‘unwell’ and in need of treatment) to a health promotion perspective which seeks systemic enhancement and improvement. Despite the 2017 crisis narrative, our research suggests that there are no particular areas of weakness: original political messaging about deficiencies in new teachers’ ability to teach literacy and numeracy have been debunked as levels of competence and confidence in teaching both are high. Over the five-year survey period, responses stay remarkably similar across graduates’ early careers. In the survey of school-based and university-based teacher educators, we conclude that there’s still work to be done in conceptualising and operationalising effective partnership working. However, despite the range of providers and institutional philosophies in evidence, views on school- and university-based learning suggest much more consistency than we might have assumed. In process terms, the annual confirmation of funding and associated work-packages facilitated dialogue between the project team and funders. This allowed for ongoing identification of policy and research priorities, and tweaking of data collection tools to ensure maximum relevance in an ever-changing context. Essentially, this was more than a research project; it was very much a research and development project, where impact statements from co-investigators provided evidence of ongoing programme developments and staff learning in individual institutions. The MQuITE project identifies a need to move away from individualised and institutionalised offerings and evaluations towards systemic operationalisation. The lessons learned from this system-level health-check, both substantive and procedural, as well as the resulting toolkit (available on www.mquite.scot) should be of interest to other national contexts considering engaging in contextually-appropriate measurement of their own ITE systems.

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