This paper looks at the impact of digital technology on teaching and learning in primary schools in Scotland during the first COVID-19 lockdown from March to June 2020. The pandemic has challenged our understanding of schooling as, for the first time in many years, schools as we know them were shut and the school building was removed as the site of teaching and learning. This paper uses the concept of Thirdspace as developed by Edward Soja (1996), where Thirdspace is understood as an in-between space between binaries that enables the possibility to think and act otherwise. Drawing from qualitative data from interviews with primary school teachers, this paper explores how the lockdown in general, and digital technology in particular, facilitated a Thirdspace in the first COVID-19 lockdown. Findings from the study indicate that engaging with digital technology offers the teacher more possibilities than they have come to expect in the physical space of traditional schooling.

Initial Teacher Education quality is often judged through the auspices of audit-style mechanisms designed to facilitate the identification of matters pertaining to the 'readiness' of student teachers to enter the world of the classroom as fully qualified. In this regard, quality of programmes is often determined by the knowledge and skills student teachers demonstrate. Whilst ontological aspects are not necessarily elided, they are often ignored in favour of such epistemological matters. While such knowledge-based positions do not describe the totality of ITE quality evaluation they do predominate. This paper identifies a tripartite heuristic for the identification of ITE epistemology that explicitly refers to, and is requiring of, ontological matters in the development of student teachers: identifying teaching, doing teaching, knowing teaching. Whilst it is the result of a Scottish project, Measuring the Quality of Initial Teacher Education (MQuITE), its emphasis is notable for other countries. Towards Initial Teacher Education quality Since the 1980s, higher education (HE) has been discussed in terms of the 'Evaluative State' (Neave, 1998). Based on market ideals, this seeks to reduce waste and ineffectiveness through the marshalling of managerialist and technicist methods and language (Neave, 1998). Whilst state-sponsored evaluation of HE institutional practice has always existed, the Evaluative State seeks to embed change-action. Prior to such alterations, university evaluation took the form of administrative verification, which sought to transcend change rather than meet it. Periodically commissions were called that attempted to meet periods of crisis (actual or perceived) but they were not necessarily systematised (Neave, 1998). The Evaluative State embedded matters such as the regulation of student access, curriculum

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