School Led Training: An Investigation into the New School Direct Initiative for Teacher Education in England, the Experiences of Trainees and Trainers

This paper presents research undertaken with trainees, mentors and tutors who are associated with the new School Direct initiative in England. Introduced quickly in 2012, this was a new way of training teachers which is seen as school-led. That is, schools, not higher education institutions, are the leaders of this programme and in many cases universities have been cut out of the process of training teachers. The change has had serious implications for schools, education departments in universities and trainees. This research, with primary sector trainees, attempted to discover the views of recent and current trainees, mentors in schools and tutors from programme providers. Though at present the research is small and focussed on the primary phase, some serious issues have arisen including the theoretical content of the programmes and the mentors' ability to underpin practice with educational theory and subject knowledge and to use the government's qualified to teach standards correctly. [For the complete Volume 13, Number 1 proceedings, see ED568595.]