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This paper traces the key periods, players and events which have contributed to the shaping of the current landscape of teacher education in Scotland. Starting with the Wheatley Report and the formation of the General Teaching Council (Scotland) in the 1960s through to the most recent Donaldson Review of Teacher Education, we examine ebb and flow amongst GTCS, government, colleges of education and universities. Following its own trajectory, Scottish Education resisted and rejected policies emanating from an ‘English’ ideology, capitalised on respect for and influence of the GTCS, and successfully moved teacher education’s base from autonomous colleges to high-status universities. At the core of teacher education in Scotland is the continuing desire for partnership-working amongst key stakeholders: local and national government, GTCS, schools, teacher education institutions, teaching unions, parents and pupils. A teaching profession of trained graduates, underpinned by university-led subject study, is now moving steadily towards Masters-level professional learning for all. Although having faced some troubled episodes, this period has also been characterised by remarkable stability and consensus and, although still tackling the improvement agenda suggested by the recent Donaldson review, teacher education in Scotland has retained a high degree of public and political trust. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scottish secondary education was radically extended in size and social reach in the first four decades of the twentieth century, bringing significant new opportunities in secondary schooling to girls, to children of the lower-middle and upper-working classes, and to Catholics. Most of the new secondary schools were based on those parish schools that had in the nineteenth century sent a few boys directly to university, and so this new secondary sector was a modernising of the mythological tradition of the lad o' pairts. The main reason it succeeded was that it sought to extend to new social groups the benefits of the version of liberal education that had come to be regarded as the foundation of professional careers. Thus the reforms also had the effect of transferring to the senior years of the secondary schools the old undergraduate curriculum that had been replaced by more specialist university courses in the late-nineteenth century. The paper offers an evidence-based critique not only of that strand of pessimism which has claimed that Scottish education was stagnant between the wars, but also of George Davie's influential view that the tradition of a broad general education was lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]