Contemporary reform of initial teacher education (ITE) across international contexts has sharpened political agendas on issues of quality and impact. Essentially, the quality and impact of ITE is increasingly being bound up with notions of evidence of graduate performance in relation to professional standards and evidence of the impact of graduates on school student performance. Within the Australian context, these issues of quality and impact have been framed politically in terms of readiness in the recent Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG) review (Craven et.al. 2014). In this chapter, the conception of readiness and its relationship to ITE is interrogated. Educational concerns about the politically-derived conception of readiness will be examined. The contemporary reform agenda within the Australian context is then used as a case study to problematise the conception of readiness and its relationship to quality and impact in ITE. This involves a discursive analysis of readiness as used by a range of stakeholders and researchers across materials and documentation related to the recent TEMAG review (Craven et.al. 2014) of ITE. Conceptions of readiness are examined to identify their influence on perspectives about and actions taken in relation to the evidence of readiness at the point of transition from preparation to employment. It shows that there is a lack of consistent language or agreed definition of readiness which is manifested in competing discursive understandings and the misalignment of expectations for ITE. Finally, the chapter proposes a justification for the emerging conceptualisation of readiness for the profession as critical to underpinning quality initial teacher education to impact positive educational outcomes for all. [For the complete volume, "Innovation and Accountability in Teacher Education: Setting Directions for New Cultures in Teacher Education. Teacher Education, Learning Innovation and Accountability," see ED595068.]