Not ‘Another Version of the Same Thing’: Problematising and Reworking English Initial Teacher Education in Ethnically Diverse Times

For some time, concerns have been expressed about the need to prepare culturally responsive teachers for heterogeneous populations and to attract more teachers from diverse heritages and backgrounds into the profession. Alongside these calls for change, teacher education has been subjected to dominant policies designed to “raise standards” through global initiatives such as setting standards for teaching, levering up high-stakes accountability mechanisms and legislating for ever-more tighter controls on teacher certification (Menter, 2016, p.13). These moves have frequently meant that in practice, teacher education has not always dealt directly or consistently with what is involved in working with and for ethnic diversity. While there have been some policy attempts to recruit more minoritised ethnic teachers, these interventions have not been systematic or sustained and the vexed issue of retention has not been responded to adequately. In this chapter we explore the need to problematise and rework teacher education, with a particular focus on the future of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in the English context. We raise concerns and questions about policy responses to the problem of a lack of diversity in the teacher workforce, educational reform more generally and the limits of reforms. Drawing on insights from the work by the Runnymede Trust (The Runnymede Trust: https://www.runnymedetrust.org ), the UK’s leading independent race equality think tank, we argue that without a commitment to a more critical exploration of positionality and power in raced systems, little will be achieved beyond tokenistic responses. We conclude that what is needed is a teaching force that better reflects our society, a system that supports minoritised ethnic teachers and an ITE curriculum that makes a systematic and rigorous response to sensitising all teachers to diversity.