Our UCET conference keynote called for a renewed, profession-led vision of high-quality Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in England. After years of policy reform the sector has shown remarkable resilience, yet policy changes have too often reduced teacher education to questions of content, sequencing, and compliance, sidelining the sector’s expertise and, in effect, allowing others to define quality for us.

Since 2021, ITE policy has centred on consistency and compliance, with little attention to the professional purpose, ethics, and intellectual foundations of teaching. The sector has adapted, but often at the expense of the deeper principles that shape teachers’ learning. Our keynote aimed to take a step back and ask:

• What do we, as a profession, believe high-quality ITE looks like?

and

• Where is the evidence of shared values across our sector?

Moving beyond the constraints of recent policy reforms we explored what the sector itself considers to be high-quality ITE, grounded in scholarship, inquiry, and professional expertise, drawing on two recent projects: one examining signature pedagogies of teacher education, and another, a Delphi study exploring the extent of consensus on what constitutes quality in ITE.

The overarching theme of the conference “How could teachers and teacher educators develop as inquiring professionals?” signalled a strong push towards articulating the values of research-informed, reflective, and inquiry-based practice. This theme was a public affirmation of UCET’s commitment towards the role of ITE in empowering educators to be much more than passive recipients of policy.

University based ITE in England, as reflected in the UCET conference programme, is, therefore, actively negotiating its identity in the face of policy pressures, technological change, and societal challenges — and doing so with a strong emphasis on professional agency, research, and community.

UCET has long articulated this through the Intellectual Basis of Teacher Education (IBTE), which we understand to be a scholarly intellectual perspective, not just an organisational position paper. The IBTE emphasises the value placed on teachers as critical thinkers, epistemic agents, and morally responsible professionals. This vision echoes and is echoed across scholarship in the field which does not have market rationales such as value for money and simplistic accountability as its starting point. Yet despite scholarship from our own community, university-based ITE has seemed to struggle to establish itself as the locus of experience and expertise in debates about the quality of teaching (and teacher education).

Using Shulman’s concept of signature pedagogies , the keynote drew on emerging research (Brooks, McIntyre and Mutton 2023; Brooks, McIntyre, Mutton, Burn, & Hetherington, L. 2025, Brooks, McIntyre, Mutton, Burn & Hetherington, in press) which explores how ITE leaders, during the Market Review, worked to align imposed surface structures (e.g., mandated curriculum components) with deeper professional values (e.g., subject expertise, relational teaching). Using Shulman as an analytical lens, this research helps to explain why the sector often struggles to respond to policy demands: what policymakers define as “quality” does not necessarily match the profession’s deep structures or implicit values.

To develop our theme of a profession-led vision for high-quality ITE, the second half of the keynote focused on our recent Delphi Method research project (McIntyre, J., Murphy, V., Mutton, T. & Nangalia, A. (2025) ) conducted across 13 research-intensive university partnerships. Our study, which was carried out across our sample of university- and school-based teacher educators in England between 2022 and 2023, set out to investigate where there might be consensus as to what high-quality initial teacher education (ITE) might look like. We adopted this approach to be able to articulate, in a systematic way, an alternative sector-agreed view of what high quality in ITE might look like.

Our research showed that the strongest agreement centred not on programme content or structure, but on purpose (thus aligning with the signature pedagogies work). Participants consistently prioritised values-driven aims, such as the need to cultivate teacher agency, professional identity, critical reflection, and relational practice. There was also strong support for recognition of the expertise of ITE providers, the importance of research-informed knowledge, and the indispensability of robust school university partnerships.

The qualitative responses within the data revealed clear themes: the need for resistance to ideologically-driven regulation; a commitment to collaboration, rather than competition; and a shared belief in professionalism as the bedrock of teacher education.

The study therefore enabled us to generate a clear list of prerequisites for high-quality ITE including:

• Shared ethics and values
• Programmes that cultivate agency, identity, and critical reflection
• Pedagogies that cultivate empathy, trust and mutual respect
• Pedagogies that integrate theory and practice
• A research-informed knowledge base‑informed knowledge base
• Collaborative partnerships between universities and schools
• Professional (not political) accountability

Without these, we argue, ITE risks becoming a technical, dehumanised, performative system. We suggest using these prerequisites as a focus for ongoing discussion, including consideration of the risks when any one is absent. This shared language can help the sector articulate why policy changes that undermine a single prerequisite carry specific dangers. By responding to policy through a clear, profession-led rationale, we strengthen our position in any future policy review of our work.

As a sector, we must assert, collectively and confidently, that policy must follow professional purpose, not dictate it. If we do not define quality ourselves, others will define it for us. Now is the moment to reclaim the narrative by making our moral purpose and ethical practices visible—and to work collectively toward a profession-led, values-rich vision for ITE.