In this book, we have taken cultural political economy approach to the critical analysis of teacher education policies and institutional practices after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008. While this has involved the examination of political-economic ideas and their materialisations underpinning the activity of preparing teachers, specifically for public education systems, across national contexts, it has also involved considering the cultural dimensions of these materialisations and how they continue to evolve historically. We have situated our analysis within broader historical accounts of the emergence of the institutional practices of teacher education and how these practices have been associated with the expansion of public education and how this provision has responded to changing social class relations, industrialisation and nation-building as well as the exercise of colonial power, including through enslavement and segregation. We have shown how new forms of teacher preparation have emerged, and continue to develop, in relation to historically evolving welfare state structures – and the challenges to them – and their underlying cultural as well as political-economic bases. The three global settings on which we have focused – the US, England and Norway – provided critical reference points in this discussion as well as allowing us to explore the nuances of similarity and difference, something which we believe makes our research distinct from the more usual teacher education policy critiques that can assume that there is both a uniform travelling idea (usually neoliberalism, writ large) as well as uniform effects across contexts (usually the creation of free or quasi-markets as a result of privatisation). We have traced the power of the enterprise narrative – in terms of its power as a narrative – and the allure of the teacher education policy entrepreneur and how the creation of shadow state structures has been both channelled through value-laden discourses of reform and innovation as well as through power relations that have influenced the distribution of state funding.

While we have argued that the turning point of the GFC in 2008 accelerated the crises of teacher education that had been more or less consistent features of public policy over the previous three decades,