‘It felt like a secret ballot’: the impact of reaccreditation on academics working in initial teacher education in England, 2022/2023

Quickfall, A and Wood, P ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9707-0501, 2025. ‘It felt like a secret ballot’: the impact of reaccreditation on academics working in initial teacher education in England, 2022/2023. Journal of Education for Teaching. ISSN 0260-7476

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Abstract

In 2022, a mandatory accreditation process was enacted across the pre-service teacher education sector in England, the successful navigation of which would be a requirement for institutions to continue offering initial teacher education (ITE) beyond 2024. We surveyed 143 academics working in university-based ITE in 2022/23, using an online survey to capture a range of their experiences of the academic year. In this paper, we focus on the experiences of the re-accreditation process. The results show significant concerns about accreditation within this group, at individual, team, institution and wider levels, including workload, perceptions of ideologically motivated change and existential concerns for the sector. Taking a novel discourse analysis approach to the study data, we conclude that the accreditation process has had a serious and negative impact on ITE academics in 2022/23. Whilst our focus is on one country, which is an outlier in terms of the policy, regulation and accountability of teacher education, there are national governments that have expressed an interest in carrying out their own provider accreditation processes, and this may be of interest to those working in ITE in those countries, and to anyone who has an interest in the future of pre-service teacher education and teacher educators.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Journal of Education for Teaching
Creators:	Quickfall, A. and Wood, P.
Publisher:	Informa UK Limited
Date:	25 July 2025
ISSN:	0260-7476
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1080/02607476.2025.2536112 DOI 2478255 Other
Rights:	© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham Institute of Education
Record created by:	Laura Borcherds
Date Added:	01 Aug 2025 16:21
Last Modified:	01 Aug 2025 16:21
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/54112

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