Corpus-based Discourse Analysis of Teacher Education policy in England (2010-2021)

How do education policies in England construct teacher education? Is this distinct from previous education policy? Can we use new methods to discover discourses? Do education policies in England relate to global education trends?

This project was prompted by massive changes in the teacher education landscape in England, and reforms which appeared to be different in nature from previous policy eras. Ellis (2023) describes this as a policy induced ‘teacher education crisis’. In this project, I sought to understand the nature of education policy in the modern conservative era from a neutral standpoint, without interjecting my 
subjective experience as a teacher educator.

To remain ‘cool’ on a ‘hot’ topic, corpus analysis was employed to answer the research questions: how do education policies in England construct teacher education? Is this distinct from previous education policy? Are discourses discoverable through corpus based CDA of education policies in England? Do they relate to global education reform trends?

Two corpora were constructed for the project; one collated education policy documents in 2010-2021 (MCEP), and another collated education policy documents in 1970-2009 (EPC). The analysis used Wordsmith 8 (Scott, 2020) to compute keywords, concordance, and collocation. Hyatt’s (2013) critical policy discourse analysis frame was used to explore themes. The themes identified in this analysis 
were governance (control) and marketisation (choice). These themes have strong connections to analyses of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) (Sahlberg, 2011) and contribute to understanding how education policy discourses can frame teacher education.