ALTERNATIVE TEACHER TRAINING PROGRAMMES IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

Abstract

Education systems in many countries in Europe and around the world are facing acute teacher shortages. The greatest shortage is observed in the fields of sciences, mathematics and preschool education. Traditional university teacher training cannot solve this problem on its own. In these circumstances, governments have to search for new response mechanisms. One of these is alternative pathways to obtaining teaching qualifications – educational programmes that operate alongside traditional initial teacher training and mostly provide accelerated forms of psychological and pedagogical education for people who already have a higher education degree in a non-teaching field. The structure of such programmes has not been sufficiently studied and systematised in scientific literature. Therefore, this article aims to examine alternative programmes and pathways to the teaching profession in selected European countries and to identify ways of institutionalising such programmes in Ukraine. To this end, the paper applies comparative methods of pedagogical research to studying select scientific publications, reports from international organisations, information from government, educational institutions and media websites. The results of the study show that alternative programmes for entering the teaching profession for people with higher education usually last about a year; in part-time formats, their duration increases. Such programmes are the main pathway into teaching in the United Kingdom; they play a significant role in other Western European countries, while in Central and Eastern European countries the legal and institutional conditions for the development of such programmes are only partially in place.