Abstract
The study investigates student teachers’ continuous accounts of their teacher learning on the one-year Primary Post-Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) in order to reveal the process and context of a professional programme at work. Using a case study approach, diaries, interviews, observations, questionnaires and documentary evidence were utilised to capture the experiences of seventeen student teachers. In uncovering the complexity of influences on the students from the different aspects of the programme - workload, tutors, schools, class teachers - the data presents glimpses into the variety of conditions that influence professional learning and the tensions and contradictions apparent from governmental pressures on teacher education. The evidence reveals that the processes of learning appeared to be shaped by three clusters of interacting experience: school, personal being and college. It concluded that in addition to the problems posed by school practice and personal lives, the PGCE programme itself contributed to the students’ difficulties by exhibiting unresolved tensions between different sets of values as a nationwide competence model of teacher education gradually displaced one which emphasised reflectiveness.