The quality of secondary Mathematics PGCE courses: a critical perspective on the inspection of initial teacher education

The quality of initial teacher education courses has been the subject of adverse comment and media speculation for some time. During 1996/7, Ofsted began a comprehensive round of inspections of initial teacher education providers using an extensive framework of inspection. This paper reports the results of the first round of inspection of secondary mathematics PGCE providers. Almost three-quarters were judged to be good or better. In examining the inspection reports from a critical perspective, this paper focuses on the level of consistency in the judgements made in the published inspection reports