2026 Conference
The theme for the 2026 SCoTENS conference, Exploring Diversity in Teacher Education, invites educators, researchers, and policymakers to engage with how diverse identities, experiences, and perspectives shape teaching and learning. The conference will explore diversity across the profession, including recruitment, retention, and representation, as well as how teachers are prepared for increasingly diverse and complex classrooms. It will highlight inclusive curriculum design, lived experience, and everyday practice, while addressing wellbeing, sustainability, and long-term system change. By connecting policy, practice, and teacher education, this year’s conference aims to advance our shared dialogue on more equitable, responsive, and empathic education for learners and teachers across all contexts and career stages.
In order to address the theme, participants are asked to consider:
- How can teacher education engage with and respond to diverse identities, experiences, and perspectives in meaningful ways?
- What are the key challenges and opportunities in promoting diversity within the teaching profession, including recruitment, retention, and representation?
- How can teachers be effectively prepared for increasingly diverse and complex classroom environments?
- What approaches can support inclusive practice, wellbeing, sustainability, and long-term change in education systems?
This year’s SCoTENS conference offers a timely opportunity to critically consider this major theme and examine the questions indicated above.
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STUDENT-TEACHER EXCHANGE
Providing the next generation of teachers the opportunity to experience a very different educational, social and political setting.
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Seed Funding Scheme
Each year, SCoTENS provides Seed Funding to support a number of collaborative research projects and professional activities in teacher education in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Read MoreAbout SCoTENS
Welcome to the home of the Standing Conference on Teacher Education, North and South (SCoTENS). SCoTENS is a network of 34 colleges of education, university education departments, teaching councils, curriculum councils, education trade unions and education centres on the island of Ireland with a responsibility for and interest in teacher education.
SCOTENS was established in 2003 to create a safe space for teacher educators – North and South– to come together and discuss issues of common interest, and explore ways of co-operating closely together. A part of the broader peace dynamic that was gathering momentum on the island of Ireland at the time, it has always been rooted in the deepest commitment to quality teaching and learning for all. We believe that SCOTENS is the only network of its kind operating across a contested border in the world.
It has been involved in supporting a wide range of research, conference and exchange projects since it was founded in 2003:
The SCoTENS annual conference is a key fixture in the education calendar on the island of Ireland. The annual SCoTENS conference provides a forum where teacher educators across the island of Ireland can engage in open, critical and constructive analysis of current issues in education with a view to promoting a collaborative response to these issues.
The SCoTENS Seed Funding Programme promotes and funds a range of research-based initiatives with a view to establishing sustainable North-South partnerships and projects.
The North/South Student Teacher Exchange project, brings student teachers from Dublin to do a key part of their assessed teaching practice in Belfast schools, and Belfast student teachers to do the same in Dublin. Its membership is open to all Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) that offer programmes of Initial Teacher Education (ITE).