The past two decades have borne witness to increasingly intensive political engagement for the purposes of improving teacher education and national audit systems have emerged to assure the public about the quality of college and university programs for professional educators. Sharing a concern about the increased global trends on standardising procedures the purpose of this paper is to:

1)      Investigate and critically discuss the principal discourse(s) in national policy rhetoric(s) on accreditation of initial teacher education against the backdrop of dominant global trends.

2)      Identify the manner in which the dominant discourses are inscribed into policy and accreditation documents with a shaping influence on student teachers formation processes.

3)      Document the perspectives of key insider actors in teacher education and the accreditation process of the professional and performative dimensions of recent policy shifts and attendant processes.

4)      On the basis of addressing the foregoing questions, discuss alternative possibilities for improving teacher education more in tune with the vicissitudes of contemporary socio-cultural and economic realities.

For the empirical analysis, we draw on the ‘case’ of Ireland.

There is scarcely one national context wherein initial teacher education is being criticised and reformed, as evidenced, for example, by the recent White Paper in England which sets the international context and  tone by asserting that “what really matters is how we’re doing compared with our international competitors” (Education, 2010, p. 3). Meantime, the Department of Education and Skills (DES) in Dublin launched a document, the catalyst for which was Ireland’s considerable drop down the PISA international league tables, particularly in Reading (OECD, 2010). This process culminated in the publication of a definitive plan to tackle literacy and numeracy (2011). It strongly suggests that professional formation in relation to literacy and numeracy is inadequate. Simultaneously, the Teaching Council published a policy on the ‘Teaching Continuum’ (2011), and  ‘Criteria and Guidelines’ for Initial Teacher Education (2011).  

The Teaching Council, a statutory body (2006) about to take on significant powers with regard to teacher professional learning, has been accrediting initial teacher education programmes in the Irish context, and these eight reports on those programmes are published (www.teachingcouncil.ie).

This is the immediate context in which analysis in this paper is undertaken. However, the Irish case is situated within international policy reform discourses, influenced by the ideas of the neo-liberal rhetoric and practices of New Public Management (NPM) underlying much of current education policies.  Yet, the discussion  moves beyond more general critiques of globalisation, international competitiveness, continuous improvement etc,  in pursuit of deeper insights into the manner in which international discourses are ‘refracted’ within teacher education policy.

Seeing teaching as a profession (Evetts 2003), we discuss current discourses in light of the traditional ideal of professionals; to serve both clients and the interests of society (Durkheim 2001; Parsons 1951,1968). In more recent times, this idea is recognised as the moral and political dimension of professionalism, characterised variously as ‘social trustee professionalism’ ( Brint 1994), , ‘civic professionalism’ (Sullivan 2005) and   ‘critical professionalism’(Barnett 1997). 

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