Teacher education and the GERM: policy entrepreneurship, disruptive innovation and the rhetorics of reform

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the question: how do a new cadre of teacher education providers in England, imbued in the discourses of the Global Education Reform Movement, construct the problem of a supposedly “failing” existing teacher education system associated with universities; what solutions to this problem do they propose and on what grounds; and how sound are their arguments? We make a rhetorical analysis of publicly available discourse from a “new rhetorical” perspective. We focus on one case in England: the Institute for Teaching (IFT), an organisation that has grown out an influential Multi-Academy Trust (MAT) and that models itself on independent Graduate Schools of Education in the USA, such as Relay. We examine the emergence of the IFT as a case of policy entrepreneurship, capitalising on a travelling policy idea to create a market for its provision of “practice”-based teacher education programmes. We show how the IFT has rhetorically constructed its policy window using typical neo-liberal,...