In the first two decades of the 21st century, Clinical Approaches to teacher education gained significant ground, with programs and associated research advanced in countries including the United States, England, Scotland, and Australia (see Burns and Mutton, 2015; Conroy et al. 2013; Kiewaldt, 2013; McLean Davies et al, 2015). These programs, reflecting the “practicum turn” (Mattsson et al, 2011) in teacher education, a commitment to quality teaching taken to scale, and the desire to raise the status and quality of teacher education experiences, sought new partnerships between schools and universities, reimagined assessment, and in some national contexts, gained significant support from policymakers (AGDE, 2015) and school communities, transforming approaches to professional learning (McLean Davies et al., 2017). These programs also faced criticism and skepticism, particularly concerning the appropriateness of clinical nomenclature for teacher education (McKnight 2020), and the resources needed to sustain these models.

In light of the UNESCO SDG4– to ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all,’ this symposium asks what value and opportunities, if any, Clinical Models of teacher education hold in the context of a global teaching workforce crisis, and intense policy animation around questions of teacher quality internationally. It considers how clinical models have been sustained and/or evolved over the past two decades. Four different national contexts–Australia, Scotland, England, and Wales, will be represented in this symposium’s four papers - which will draw on national and comparative research to give an account of the clinical model as it has been developed in each country, and to consider opportunities and innovations for these models. In this way, collectively, the symposium will have explicit synergies with the conference substrands that seek to explore the characteristics of quality teaching, innovative approaches to curriculum design, and effective partnerships for equity and inclusion.