Introduction

An increased international focus on teacher quality has brought with it an increased focus on the use of standards as a means of encapsulating expressions of what it means to be a good (or satisfactory) teacher. Sahlberg (2011b, p 177) suggests that ‘a widely accepted – and generally unquestioned – belief among policymakers and education reformers is that setting clear and sufficiently high performance standards for schools, teachers, and students will necessarily improve the quality of desired outcomes’. This ‘generally unquestioned belief ‘ has been translated into policy measures that are arguably not informed sufficiently by a rigorous evidence base, and the link between the publication of standards-based policies and their impact on the practice of teachers and ultimately the educational achievement of pupils, has not been subjected to sufficient empirical scrutiny.

This chapter considers how the drive for accountability in terms of teacher quality is enacted through the production of professional standards for teachers in the four nations of the UK and neighbouring Republic of Ireland. We have seen in the foregoing chapters how standards and accountability are major concerns in all five of these countries. Through discourse analysis of the standards documents, the chapter presents an analysis of the espoused aims, the content and the structure of the various conceptualisations of standards, illustrating in each a range of explicit and implicit purposes. It considers how the concept of ‘accountability’ is made visible through the existence of standards-based approaches, identifying both commonalities and divergent themes across and between nations. What it does not do is analyse how such policy documents are enacted, and it is acknowledged that this is of course important and these processes have been described to some extent in the chapters in Part Two of this book. However, the standards documents themselves present the official version of the discourse, as authorised by those charged with overseeing teacher governance, be they governments themselves or professional bodies. And, indeed, the location of the ultimate governance over such issues is in itself worthy of analysis, as this chapter reveals.

There follows an overview of the policy context and discussion of key areas of debate in the literature.