Initial Teacher Education policy has had an increasingly high public profile across Europe in recent years, with mounting evidence regarding the crucial role of high quality initial teacher education in improving long term educational outcomes for pupils (OECD 2005; MacKinsey 2007; European Commission 2007; UNESCO 2011) . Governments across Europe have increasingly focused on the governance and regulation of initial teacher education, with 'performative' cultures (Apple 2005, Ball, 1994, 2003) developing, to a varying degree, across almost all countries in Europe (and beyond) (Codd 2005; Gerwitz et al 2006; Drudy 2008; Jeffrey 2010). This phenomenon, however, is nowhere more noticable than in England, where successive governments have, over the past two decades, increased both the extent and intensity of the regulation framework of the 'performance' of teachers and schools (Ball 1994,2003; Troman 2007).  In the UK context, a particularly overt characteristic of this framework is the use of market levers at both school and teacher education level (Ball 2003).

Previous UK governments' performative policies where characterised by three parallel strands; highly data-driven performance targets, an 'high stakes' inspection regime and the explicit use of market levers to reward the 'successful' and, in the government's  view, drive up standards elswhere, but according to critics, punish those where other factors meant that performance targets could not be met (Ball 2003, Perryman 2006).  However, during the Labour administration (1997-2010) these policies were largely justified through a pragmatic 'what works' approach (Wilkins & Wood 2009); the current government's continuance, and intensification, of performative systems has been much more overtly ideologically grounded . In the case of ITE, the most notable element of this has been the drive to move the commissioning and delivery into schools and away from universities.

At the heart of government rhetoric lies both a neo-liberal market discourse, emphasising parental choice, and schools' capacity and appetite for controlling the commissioning and delivery of the training of their workforce, and a consciously 'conservative-traditionalist' discourse about  the 'craft' of teaching and a 'master-apprentiship' model of training. This has been mirrored by reforms in schools' policy, driven by rhetoric around 'traditional, subject knowledge-driven curricula, and they  academic  - allied with schools' policies focusing on curriculum reform (on a mtraditional academic lines and

In England, the latest plans to withdraw Initial Teacher Education further from the universities and shift it into school-based training, as well as recent cuts in financing the training places, has intensified the discussion on the aims and functions of Initial Teacher Education today.

This discussion paper examines in detail the range of ITE policy  initiatives introduced since 2010, particularly focusing on the impact on diversification of routes into teaching and on the changing nature of relationships between schools and universities engaged in ITE.

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