Standards for the Award of Qualified Teacher Status: Reflections on assessment implications

The paper raises some concerns about the assessment procedures implicit in the new Standards for the award of Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) issued by the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) and, as a consequence, a question mark is raised over the process and purpose of their introduction to initial teacher education (ITE) in England and Wales. What appears to be a technocratic approach to the assessment of teacher trainees in reality straddles a hybrid position in terms of the assessment model on which it is based. Little regard has been given, in the public domain at least, either to the rationale behind the introduction of the Standards or to the process of implementation. Having taken the ITE world more by surprise than storm this paper reflects upon the Standards in the context of assessment. It builds on previous pleas for a relevant assessment paradigm for workplace assessment, that of the judgemental model (Hager & Butler, 1996; Martin, 1997).