Peter Posch/Franz Rauch Essay Review McBride, R. (Ed.) (1996) Teacher Education Policy. Some issues arising from research and practice. Falmer Press: London Washington D.C. pp. 297 The book is a collection of papers which were presented at two symposia at the Annual Conference of the British Education Research Association (BERA) in September 1993. The structure of the book follows the different stages of Teacher Training (pre-service, induction, and in-service) and concludes with some broader considerations. The individual papers represent a considerable variety of approaches. There are reports on research projects, comprehensive overviews and essays with a very personal touch. However, the diversity is bracketed by two salient characteristics of teacher education in England: the intrusion of market-ideology into education and the increasing involvement of schools in teacher training. Since 1992 British legislation has given schools prime responsibility for teacher training. Schools can develop their own training programmes either in cooperation with a university or independently, and after accreditation they are entitled to carry them out on their own. Chris Husbands in Change Management in Initial Teacher Education: National Contexts, Local Circumstance and Dynamics of Change describes four policy changes of ITE in England: • requesting (secondary) teacher training to be based on partnership between HE and schools, with schools taking the lead in the whole training process; • prioritizing for this purpose schools which ”command the greatest confidence in academic and other aspects of measured performance” • extending the amount of time of trainee teachers to be spent in schools to 80% (later reduced to 66%) • basing assessment on a competency framework defining ”specific knowledge understanding and skills needed by the newly qualified teacher” Husbands locates a number of sources, a major one being the demands of the New Right to weaken and even eliminate the hold over teacher training by the teacher training profession. This context is specifically English and quite different from most countries in the European Union where teacher education is still predominantly controlled by the post-secondary education sector. In several countries there is rather an opposite tendency to further upgrade teacher education. One motive is the understanding that a high status of teachers in society is dependent on the status of their training and is an indispensable prerequisite for the quality of their services. There is a strong feeling that some educational problems in England (and in the United States) may have to do with the relatively low status of teachers and with the low academic reputation of their training. However, the relationship between teacher education institutions and schools as well the relationship between theory and practice in teacher education also dominate the discussion in other European countries, albeit for different reasons. There is a growing contention that schools have to develop at a faster pace in order to respond constructively to the ongoing changes in societies: changes in the socialisation of the young, changes in their prospects of integration into adult society, changes in their access to information, etc. . For instance, the conflict between an emerging "negotiation culture” in families with the traditional "command culture” in schools, the decreasing job prospects for young people, are challenges for both, HE as well as schools, which demand new forms of cooperation (Posch/Mair in print; Krainer/Posch 1996).