Teach for America, which began in 1989 as a market response to teacher shortages and underachievement in disadvantaged communities, brought high-achieving graduates into schools serving the poorest students. This inspired Teach First in the UK, which began in 2002. Teach for All was founded in 2007 and led to the establishment of Teach First Denmark and Teach for Sweden in 2013. These programmes were motivated by a teacher retention and recruitment crisis, which began in the early 2010s and continues across Europe (EPRS, 2024), and a longstanding concern with underachievement in poor areas (most recently highlighted in OECD, 2023). They illustrate the rising influence and activity of international philanthropic networks in non-democratic education governance in Europe (eg Viseu, 2022). They focus on teaching and assume the character and leadership of highly successful individuals allows them, as teachers, to help disadvantaged students overcome the many social, cultural and economic barriers that lead to educational underachievement (Thomas et al., 2021).
For Wacquant (2010; 2012), the neoliberal reform of public services on the basis that mobilising market competition will promote human flourishing has never been realised as an economic project. He suggests, instead, that this is a structurally coherent political project, where the state is neither rolled back nor dismantled but reconfigured to impose the market on its citizens. In short, the state achieves this by taking a hyper-individualist stance that emphasises personal responsibility over other social obligations, and by classifying and categorising everyone and everything in relation to their utility and especially their efficiency and effectiveness. Together, these underpin discourses of meritocracy, where hard work is assumed to bring just reward. This, in turn, aligns closely with the American dream that all can achieve a better life through their own efforts and initiative, with those deemed successful valorised as models to inspire future generations.
The neoliberal technologies of marketisation, increased performativity (Ball, 2017) and the privileging of evidence informed practice and the new science of learning (Hordern & Brooks, 2023) have transformed the initial teacher education landscape in Denmark, England and Sweden, albeit in different ways. These reforms, which seek both to improve educational outcomes and tackle rising teacher attrition rates, have resulted in the narrowing of teacher education programmes (Larsen et al., 2023) and exacerbated a tension that exists across the formal education sector between promoting individual excellence and education for all. Indeed, in all three countries the gap between the highest and lowest educational achievers, which Teach for All is expected to narrow, has either remained the same (in England; Farquharson et al., 2024) or widened (in Denmark and Sweden; Christrup Kjeldsen et al., 2024) over the past 20 years.
Rizvi characterises the Teach for America agenda as, ‘ridding school districts of veteran teachers, privatising public schools, and forcing a data-driven culture upon low-income communities that face serious and often unique challenges’ (2021: xvi). Referring to Teach for All, he adds, ‘little is known, however, as to how these ideas travel, and are translated through local cultural, political, and educational traditions’ (ibid: xvii). Whilst others (Jameson Brewer et al., 2020; Thomas et al., 2021) have begun this task mostly in policy terms, our symposium explores how the common rationale of Teach for All is recontextualised in three countries chosen for their contrasting education cultures, histories and embrace of neoliberal approaches to education reform, Denmark, England and Sweden. We do this by examining programme documentation and the views of the teachers involved. The study reflects how neoliberal technologies and hyper-individualism permeate teacher education in the three countries studied.

Ball, S.J. (2017). The education debate (3rd Edition). Bristol, Policy Press. EPRS (2024). Teachers: Key to achieving the European education area. Retrieved from: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2024/762284/EPRS_BRI(2024)762284_EN.pdf [Accessed 12.12.2024]. Farquharson, C., McKendrick, A., Ridpath, N. & Tahir, I. (2024). The state of education: what awaits the next government? The Institute for Fiscal Studies. Retrieved from: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/state-education-what-awaits-next-government [Accessed 14.01.2025]. Hordern, J. & Brooks, C. (2023). The core content framework and the ‘new science’ of educational research. Oxford Review of Education, https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2023.2182768. Jameson Brewer, T., de Marrais, K. & McFaden, K.L. (Eds) (2020). Teach for All counter-narratives: International perspectives on a global reform movement. New York, Peter Lang. Larsen, E., Burke, K., Fanshawe, M, Oliver, M. & Salton, Y. (2023). Initial teacher education: Are we missing something? BERA Blog. Retrieved from: https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/initial-teacher-education-are-we-missing-something [Accessed 14.01.2025]. OECD (2023). PISA 2022 Results (Volume I): The State of Learning and Equity in Education, PISA. OECD Publishing, Paris. Rizvi, F. (2021). Forward. In: Thomas, M., Rauschenberger, E. & Crawford-Garrett, K. (Eds) Examining Teach for All: International perspectives on a growing global network. London, Routledge. Thomas, M., Rauschenberger, E. & Crawford-Garrett, K. (Eds) (2021). Examining Teach for All: International perspectives on a growing global network. London, Routledge. Wacquant, L. (2010). Crafting the neoliberal state: Workfare, prisonfare and social insecurity. Sociological Forum, 25(2), 197-220.