Despite attempts through official policy over the past forty years and up to the end of the first decade of the new millennium to ‘unite’ teacher education and provide a common teacher education programme for all teachers with a common professional scientific knowledge content, as in many other countries teacher education in Sweden today is still currently subjectively structured in accordance with a vertically and horizontally differentiated school system that gives rise to different teacher educational traditions and different ways of perceiving what characterizes the teachers’ mission and professional expertise. Moreover, recent developments are reinstating this distinction even at an objective level of formal policy. The present paper discusses and illustrates these issues based on data from three separate ethnographic studies of teacher education over the past twenty five years by the authors. This research constitutes thus a series of policy ethnographic investigation across three decades of policy making in Swedish teacher education.