Poverty, schooling, and beginning teachers who make a difference: a case study from England

Education policy makers in England have, over the last thirty years, radically changed schooling. The introduction of a national curriculum, national testing re-gimes, school inspections and school league tables has been at the heart of these changes as they constitute the basis for claims for and concerns about school and system improvement. The pre-service education of teachers has also been trans-formed during this period. Once dominated by time spent in higher education, teacher ‘training’ as it is known, now consists of diverse routes, all much more school-based. The latest policy shift to ‘teaching schools’ and the ‘school direct’ route intentionally makes universities even more marginal to teacher preparation. At the same time, policymakers, schools and university faculties of education remain concerned about children from low-income families whose life opportuni-ties are not enhanced by educational success. The thirty year policy settlement of marketization and privatization has produced some overall increase in the mass level of education but has not shifted the tenacious correlation between parental income and levels of formal education and educational attainment. Teacher edu-cators in higher education and in schools have little time or space to address this question directly. In this chapter we present a case study of the teacher education programme which is deliberately designed to address questions of poverty and educational disadvantage – Teach First, a ‘leadership development’ scheme which takes ‘high calibre graduates’ into the most disadvantaged schools in the country