The development of teachers has always been central to NATE’s work, and the ITE Working Group continues to provide a focus for research, debate and the development of teacher education. Against a backdrop of unwelcome ITE reforms, Lorna Smith and Rachel Roberts survey NATE’s work in initial teacher education.
A forum for ITE
NATE’s ITE Working Group has provided an essential forum for English ITE specialists to connect and share good practice in English teacher development for several decades. Its aims are not only to provide a vital voice for the English teacher educator community, but also to engage with and share research in English pedagogy and English teacher development. Members are active researchers, as well as teacher educators, which allows a unique perspective on subject English in the curriculum — how English is taught, and how English teachers develop in their practice.
Over the years, many members of the Working Group have also been actively involved in NATE’s wider work, sitting on the Council and Management Committee and organising the NATE conference; a number have served as NATE’s Chair. Many of NATE’s publications similarly reflect the cutting-edge of research in English and English pedagogy undertaken by the group’s members, including the NATE book series published by Routledge and the association’s peer-reviewed journal English in Education.
Developing pedagogies, challenging policies
The ITE group (currently chaired by Sue Pinnick) has always been a vanguard of English-specific pedagogies, when necessary questioning and challenging prescriptive policies and practices that do not suit our discipline. For example, twenty years ago the then-committee published an article in Literacy, drawn from their research across five different university departments of education, focusing on how English PGCE students ‘transform what they know as they learn to teach’ through reflexive practice. Ten years on, Bethan Marshall and Vicky Obied guest-edited a special ITE edition of English in Education that included articles with provocative titles such as Surveying the wreckage: The professional response to changes to initial teacher training in the UK (Hodgson, 2014) and Possibility in impossibility? Working with beginning teachers of English in times of change (Mcintyre and Jones, 2014). These emphasise the critical (in both senses of the word) role of the group in terms of challenging prescription.
During the 2000s, the group developed a series of Position Papers on ITE in English, regularly updated, drawing on good practice from PGCE programmes from all over of the country (including Manchester, Durham and Roehampton). The 2013 Paper, responding to renewed policy pressure to divorce university-based routes from school-based, made the point that becoming a teacher requires more than ‘training’ – it is ‘a fully educative process – not in opposition to the necessary training, but as complementary to it’ — a view still held by the Working Group today.
A community of practice
More recently, its unique position between teacher education, research and classroom practice meant that the Working Group was well-placed to respond robustly to the consultation on the ITT Market Review in 2021, voicing subject-specific concerns. The group has since established regional hubs of English ITE colleagues, which enables even wider discussion and sharing of ideas and approaches – these being particularly significant in the light of the challenges raised by the recent ITE Market Review.
As a community of practice, the ITE Working Group’s annual conference continues to provide an excellent forum to share English pedagogical research, philosophies and thinking. These conferences have developed from the annual symposium held in a classroom at the Institute of Education (where the original committee met three times a year). Outgrowing that location, the conference took place for a number of years in the British Library, with attendees able to explore the BL’s current exhibition once the business of the day had concluded. Before the Covid-19 lockdowns, two conferences were hosted by the English and Media Centre, underlining the strong partnership between NATE and the EMC. Recent conferences have taken place online – an advantage of which is that they now attract international attendees – themed around a pertinent topic. The teaching of writing (2019), the nature of knowledge in English teaching (2021) and how language creates (2023) have proved popular and successful.
The ITE Working Group thus informs NATE’s thinking and practice via academic and practitioner publications, workshops, keynote talks, the ITE hubs and involvement in local branch work. There is an integral connection between the objectives of the group and the work of the association centrally. As our members work primarily with beginning teachers of English, we recognise the importance of subject associations in the establishment of the English teacher’s identity, and in providing an induction into the community of teachers of English, the aims of English teaching, and the integrity of our subject. There can be no greater privilege!
Further reading
DfE (2021) Initial teacher training (ITT) market review: recommendations. Government consultation. Available at: www.education.gov.uk
Hodgson, J (2014) Surveying the wreckage: The professional response to changes to initial teacher training in the UK. English in Education 48 (1) 7–25
Mcintyre, J. & Jones, S (2014) Possibility in impossibility? Working with beginning teachers of English in times of change. English in Education 48 (1) 26–40
NATE ITE Committee (2013) Position Paper: Initial Teacher Education for Secondary English (Archived)
Stevens, D., Cliff Hodges, G., Gibbons, S., Hunt, P., Turvey, A (2006) Transformations in learning and teaching through Initial Teacher Education. Literacy 40 (2) 97–105
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