Following our discussion of the importance of the enterprise narrative to policy makers, in this chapter we look at two ways in which concepts from business and economics have been appropriated in teacher education reform consequential to a new emphasis on school systems ‘growing their own’ (that is, training and educating) their own supply of teachers. We examine the growing importance of branding and vertical integration in teacher education, particularly in how they seek to address questions of quality and effectiveness but also how they figure in the social control of ideas about teaching among the teachers being ‘grown’. The chapter begins with a discussion of the influential concept of ‘producer capture’.

Producer capture and welfare state failure

The eminent British sociologist of education Geoff Whitty made a significant contribution to understanding teacher education policies in England and internationally. Whitty traced a ‘growing antipathy’ during the 1970s ‘towards the “swollen state” of the immediate postwar years’ on both economic and cultural grounds (Whitty, 2008, p 165). The Thatcher governments after 1979 sought both to disrupt and shrink welfare state responsibilities, partly on market choice principles and premised on the supposed failings of the state to deliver high quality public services. Whitty points out that these Conservative governments ‘acted to increase the power of the “consumer” and reduce that of the “producers” ‘ (2008, p 166). With specific reference to teacher education, and drawing on the work of Landman and Ozga (1995), he described the basis of the supposed failure of, particularly, universities in teacher education as the idea of producer capture, something that Taylor described as the ‘process whereby the goals of an organisation reflect the interests and prejudices of its employees (the producers) rather than those it is supposed to serve (the consumers, customers or citizens)’ (Taylor, 2008, np). University-based teacher educators and their institutional cultures were the guilty producers in the failures of the English education system and Whitty showed that this argument was made by both the Right and the Left: