Teacher Trainers and Educational Change in Britain, 1876-1996; 'a flawed and deficient history'?

This essay is designed to complement an earlier and related article which examined the ways in which schoolteachers have sought to accommodate the profound changes which have impacted upon the structure and functioning of the education service in England and Wales over the last century. On this occasion, the subjects of the discussion are teacher trainers. The article shares with the earlier piece an insistence that responses to the pressures of change in the contemporary moment are best understood under the illuminating light of a longer historical perspective. The argument also retains a similar organisational structure, seeking to analyse patterns of change against a background of three notional generations of teacher trainers between the years 1876 and 1996. The article seeks particularly to understand the construction of teacher trainer identities during this period in terms of professional responses to policy changes impinging upon the training of teachers and concludes by assessing why teacher trainers of the third generation have found it so difficult to influence the direction of policy in recent years.