Education Reform and the Role of Widening Access to Teacher Education

Glover, Alison (2023). Education Reform and the Role of Widening Access to Teacher Education. In: Nata, Roberta, V. ed. Progress in Education, Volume 77. New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., pp. 63–88.

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Abstract

The Welsh Government is delivering on several priorities to reform the country’s education sector. To support the priority to recruit high-quality teachers, teacher education in Wales has experienced many recent changes. This chapter explores the contribution of a new route into teaching that offers prospective teachers the opportunity to train to teach part-time or via an employment-based route. To investigate the extent to which these new routes into teaching are contributing to the education reform in Wales programme data, student teacher survey responses and interviews completed with student teachers over the first three years of the programme’s delivery are discussed. The effectiveness of targeting prospective teachers to address the challenges of the recruitment for rural schools, of more Welsh-medium speakers and of career changers are some of the critical elements driving the need to diversify and expand the teaching workforce in Wales. There is strong evidence that for many, without the flexibility offered by the part-time or employment-based approach into teacher education they would have been unable to make the career change into teaching. Many who train to teach via this programme are more mature in age than those who train via the traditional full-time student teacher training routes. Consequently, these student teachers possess many beneficial skills from previous experiences or careers, which are proving positive both during their training and for the schools they work in.

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