Abstract
The professional context within state primary
education in England is one which exemplifies high levels of stress on
practitioners and large attrition rates of teachers. Possible reasons for this
are many and documented but what is less documented are the worldviews of
education held prior to undertaking a teacher education pathway and how these
worldviews might develop within an Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programme
and during the early stages of a teaching career. The assumption examined in this
paper is that those entering into the profession do so with different but
strongly held worldviews of education which are challenged by the various
educative projects as articulated in state schools in the primary age phase in
England whether they are faith based, maintained, or academies whose contexts
and ethos vary. This project examined the perspectives of ITE students, some of
whom had just commenced their degree programme and others at the completion of
it following a convergent mixed methods approach. Findings suggest there are no
statistical or narrative differences between student perspectives on personal
worldviews of education at the commencement and completion of an Initial
Teacher Education degree. This is despite their participation on a prolonged
education degree with extensive professional placement experience in a variety
of schools. The implications are that the ITE provider in this study and
perhaps others could develop programmes to inform early career educators’
personal worldviews of education in order to foster philosophically informed
professionals alongside the technical knowledge and skills currently being
developed.
