This is a provocative, important and, to my knowledge, unique book about initial teacher education within and across five national contexts – each of the jurisdictions of the United Kingdom (UK) (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales) and the Republic of Ireland (RoI). Of course there are now many books, reports and special issues of journals that provide an international look at teacher education or compare the goals, approaches and outcomes of initial teacher preparation in two or more countries. Some of these are intended to highlight policies and practices to be imitated or borrowed from ‘high-performing’ countries; others provide case studies or empirical analyses of particular teacher education policies and practices in a selection of countries and then consider cross-cutting trends and policy implications. While this book joins the ranks of these extant volumes in certain ways, it is unique in others.

The book is a product of the Teacher Education Group (TEG) in collaboration with education researchers from the RoI. The decade-long agenda of TEG is inquiry into learning to teach across the four jurisdictions of the UK. As this book demonstrates, the ‘home-international’ approach taken up by the group is remarkably productive in revealing both continuities/discontinuities and convergences/divergences in teacher education policy since 1984 within one relatively small geographic area that has complex historical and geopolitical connections to Europe, Australasia and the Americas. In fact, I think that one of the major contributions of the book is its juxtapositioning of trenchant intra-national analyses of teacher education policy and practice in each of the five jurisdictions (Chapters Four to Eight, which describe teacher education policy in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the RoI, respectively) with analyses of cross-national trends and supranational discourses (Chapters Nine to Twelve, which take up broader issues, namely standards/accountability, research, higher education and partnerships, respectively). Together with three introductory chapters that lay out the book’s comparative approach, the country and cross-country analyses confirm that teacher education policies – like other education and social policies – are actively translated, mediated and contested (rather than passively transferred or passed along) within and across particular national contexts.