The Teach First is an initial teacher training programme first established in England in 2002.  As a charity established as part of government policy its mission is to address educational disadvantage by transforming exceptional graduates into effective, inspirational teachers and leaders in all fields.  This vigorous focus of Teach First gives a flavour of the major issues, some positive and some negative, for evaluators.  Furthermore, in the current policy climate in England there are a number of routes into teaching and the landscape is very fluid.  So the chief methodological challenge is to establish how far, if at all, and in what ways Teach First trainees and post-training Teach First teachers can be distinguished from other training routes in contributing to their schools’ outcomes at organisational and pupil levels.   Teacher educators internationally may be interested in the innovative direction taken by the training programme itself, the solutions evaluators have found to methodological challenges and early findings arising from the evaluation evidence itself.

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