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This paper draws on findings from a national evaluation of the Teacher Training Agency’s National Partnership Programme (NPP) (2001–2005) to analyse the current practice of partnership in initial teacher education in England. The paper begins by drawing on the MOTE studies (Furlong, et al., 2000) undertaken in the 1990s to describe the practice of partnership during that decade. It goes on to describe the changing policy context of teacher education in England since new Labour came to power in 1997, including the Government’s concern substantially to increase the numbers of new teachers entering the profession; it was this commitment, the authors argue, that was in part behind the development of the NPP which was intended to increase both the quality and capacity of schools to take part in initial teacher education. The authors go on to describe the NPP as it was put into practice in nine Government regions across England and their evaluation of it, which included 127 interviews with a range of stakeholders within each of the government regions. They suggest that, although the programme did probably contribute to increasing the numbers of partnership places in schools during its lifetime, the NPP did not alter the underlying model of partnership; indeed, they suggest that in many cases the practice of partnership in England had changed little since the mid 1990s. However, they conclude that the NPP did have an important impact on provision in that it further undermined the pedagogical and epistemological dimensions of partnership that many teacher educators in the 1990s saw as central to collaborative work between schools and higher education institutions (HEIs). The NPP, they suggest, further encouraged the development of a ‘technical rationalist’ approach to teacher education, an approach that fits well with new Labour’s broader vision for the management of the teaching profession in England.