Teacher education quality assurance policy making in India: the construction of the teacher education accreditation policy

In 2002, the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) in India, which is the national regulatory body for teacher education, and the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), which is the national quality assurance agency for higher education, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to develop and begin a process of assessment and accreditation of degree-level teacher education programmes offered by teacher education providers. This process was intended to lead to improvements in the quality of teacher education provision and consequently better teachers; which was something that had not been achieved effectively by the existing regulatory mechanisms. This initiative reflects a global popularity of external quality assurance (EQA) in higher education that had existed since the 1990s in the context of heightened concern about the quality of expanding higher education and increasing accountability demands. This thesis examines the discursive construction of the MoU in the above context and focuses on the process of formulation and the content of policy texts. The study understands policy as a social process and seeks to illuminate the context, complexity, and influences that framed the policy. It is a qualitative case study, drawing on analysis of interviews with policy-maker and policy documents. This approach was selected due to its ability to grasp the intricacies of a specific phenomenon. The findings of the study suggest that the policy of teacher education accreditation in India may be understood as a process in which adoption of a global education policy was led by national actors as a form of domestic policy borrowing. The analysis illustrates how national policy-making was influenced by various factors in a complex and nuanced manner, including the increasing international and national popularity of accreditation, neoliberal governance reform, the weakening of central government control to mediate policy, the proliferation of agencies, and the overlapping mandates and concerns of the policy actors of the time. The study argues that observed changes in national policy-making indicate that the decision-making and control in policy formulation were diffused in the overlapping lines of influence, which may have had serious social justice implications for citizens who have limited means for political contestation. Although globalisation has brought significant changes in education policy-making, resulting in increasing cross-national policy borrowing and global policy convergence, there is insufficient empirical research on its effects in diverse national contexts. This research contributes to the understanding of national policy-making in such globalising context through providing a detailed account of adoption of a globally popular policy of teacher education accreditation in India. The study makes recommendations for policymakers, which include the examination of the national policy-making space in an era of globalisation and its impact on the democratic accountability in policy formulation. The study also proposes further research, including how the national teacher education policy space is influenced by overlapping lines of influence, especially in the Global South and about the ways in which teacher education accreditation policies are mediated in diverse national contexts.