Two sides of the same coin: discourses of ‘skill’ in further education initial teacher education

Skill is ubiquitous with the English Further Education (FE) sector’s policy discourse and discursive practices, yet it is used in different ways to mean different things within the sector. Within the context of a deregulated FE Initial Teacher Education (ITE) system, the discourse is underpinned by a set of standards and guidance expected of providers, many of whom are, or work alongside, a Higher Education Institution (HEI). This research sought to determine the role that those working in this system have in recontextualising skills policy discourse. Building on interdisciplinary perspectives of skill and using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this research explored the skills discourse of 10 Teacher Educators (TEds) working within the English FE ITE sector. The discursive practices of TEds were found to be bound up with generic higher education notions of ‘graduate skills’ and ‘graduate employability’. This complements a narrow and weak discursive frame which underpins the ITE curriculum, linked to atomised standards, whereby generic teaching practices are centred to the exclusion of strongly classified theoretical and subject specialist knowledge, contributing to a narrower skills discourse and marginalisation of subject specialisms. This work has implications for policy makers and those involved in curriculum development in FE ITE.