This presentation aims to explain through ‘contrasting-comparison’ the teacher education policy-making processes in the ‘educative-states’ of England and France. The analysis tracks changes from 1980s to the present, through a comprehensive neo-institutionalist conceptual framework. Over this period, teacher education has moved in England from a fractured academia-centred system to a mosaic school-led system, and in France from a highly segmented form of ITE, with limited university involvement, towards increasing harmonization and structured university involvement in all facets of teacher education. The main foci of the presentation are the increases in claims to possess ‘evidence of what works’ by actors in (teacher) education, new certification practices and professional groupings, and transformations of policy as rooted in the socio-historical roots of the two cases.
