The UCET Intellectual Basis of Teacher Education (IBTE) (2020) was developed by a UCET working group, established to consider the values and principles that underpin the work of teacher educators in universities across the UK.

The IBTE working group was launched within a policy context very different to the one in which we now find ourselves, although challenges being faced at the time, such as issues around teacher recruitment and retention, remain. The establishment of the group coincided with the publication of the then government’s Recruitment and Retention Strategy . This contained a commitment to reviewing ‘the initial teacher training (ITT) market’, although there was little indication of what the subsequent ITT Market Review might be (a re-accreditation process, requiring all providers to demonstrate fidelity to the government’s Core Content Framework, determining the content of initial teacher education (ITE) programmes in England, and detailed prescription of how this must be delivered).

The government in 2019 seemed, at best, tolerant of, and at worst, derisory about university-based teacher education, despite the university sector providing stability over a long period, with little recognition of its contribution. The IBTE, therefore, attempted to both articulate UCET ‘s beliefs about the principles and values underpinning high-quality teacher education (both ITE and ongoing teacher professional learning) and provide a resource that could be drawn on by UCET (to inform future policy discussions with government) and by the ITE sector as a whole. At the heart of the IBTE is a “vision for high quality teacher education that values teachers as intellectuals who take an enquiring stance to their work and make meaningful contributions to the professional knowledge base”.

The IBTE working group explored key issues including: the unique contribution university teacher education makes (e.g., the intellectual and cultural resources and spaces universities can offer, pastoral support for student teachers, wider university resources, interdisciplinary opportunities, international perspectives); the collaborative university-school partnerships that are uniquely placed to draw on complementary forms of knowledge and experience, including insights gained from both research and practice; what is understood by teacher professionalism (see Winch et al, 2015), underpinned by knowledge of the ways in which professional learning takes place. This led to the IBTE concluding teacher education must be research-informed, and embedded within a model of professional collaboration, in order to produce teachers who are competent and confident professionals, epistemic agents, able to engage in enquiry-rich practice, and who are responsible professionals.

Five years on, the launch of the UCET Blog gives us an opportunity to think about how the IBTE can have a greater impact on our work, collectively and within our own partnerships, including its use when working with mentors.

In their exploration of approaches to mentoring in teacher education, Kemmis et al (2014) consider the semantic, physical and social spaces in which mentoring occurs, stating ‘wise educational leaders’ need to choose approaches ‘with care‘, ‘their choice is not just a choice of a mode of induction, it is a choice about the kind of world and the kind of profession a new teacher is inducted into’. Going beyond mentoring, and considering all aspects of ITE, could the IBTE be used, by all of us, to help us make wise choices about the approaches we take to ITE, the language we use and the behaviours we adopt?

At present the IBTE is a document that sits on the UCET website. It is referred to in our manifesto, and when we are trying to formulate arguments with policymakers, we do not, however, bring it to life or maximise its potential to help us make ‘wise choices’.

Could we, for example, use the IBTE to:

• explore and challenge the language we use in relation to ITE. Across our members, for example, we use different terms for novice teachers – does it matter? Does it impact the ‘kind of world’ we are inducting them into?
• consider our approaches to a particular element of our provision like ITaPs or assessments - how could they, for example, be designed to develop ‘epistemic agents’?
• discuss our approaches with our partnerships to develop a collective understanding of what we are trying to achieve – has anyone used it as a resource for a partnership discussion? What would the value be in doing so?
• Focus discussions around good practice – for example, how do we try to build in our new teachers ‘a predisposition to be continually intellectually curious about their work’? Could we have a series of conversations that resulted in some useful case studies?

We would like to suggest that we should challenge ourselves to start using the IBTE as a dialogic tool, and bring it to life as a powerful resource that could enable us to explore and challenge our practices and develop a compelling voice about what high quality teacher education is.

The question is, how do we make this happen?!