Initial Teacher Education (ITE) can be viewed as a formative space in professional teacher identity formation. Practice, in terms of school placement, plays a key role in shaping teacher identity, providing a window into the reality of school life, as well as nurturing professional autonomy. In March 2020 school life shifted suddenly and unrecognisably. The Covid-19 virus rendered unstable the very structures that individuals draw upon for continuity. The structures that previously acted to instil consistency and predictability were disembedded. This paper focuses on the experiences of preservice teachers on a postgraduate ITE programme in one Irish University during the period of sudden school closures in Spring 2020. The pandemic requires teacher educators to consider how effectively ITE programmes prepare teachers for the ‘dynamic and challenging new society which is emerging’ (Kalloo, 2020, 8). This paper draws on empirical data captured through surveys and focus groups with preservice teachers during the initial months of the Covid-19 pandemic. The data highlight how the move to distance learning impacted these preservice teachers’ experiences of school placement and their formation of teacher identities. The data also examine the challenges that emerged for preservice teachers in maintaining relationships of (in)dependence and trust with their students. For some, the transition to online teaching and learning was problematic, underscored by a chaotic pivot to virtual communication and a destabilising of the school structures that normally provide consistency and growth. For others, the transition provided a space for possibilities, a site of increased responsibility and a situation that allowed for ‘new ways of being and doing’ (Ennis and Tonkin, 2018, p. 344). Through a critical application of the anthropological concepts of anti-structure, communitas and liminality, this paper draws on Victor Turner’s work to consider school placement as an ‘in between’ space for preservice teachers and to examine the extent to which sudden school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic heightened this sense of ‘in betweenness’ (Turner, 1974). We argue that the pandemic and its lifting out of pervasive and predictable social structures, gave rise to a period of ‘anti-structure’ (Turner, 1969) - a social condition that emerges in liminal times. This paper conceives of school closures as an example of anti-structure, which challenged pre-service teachers’ identity formation. Across the globe policy makers decided upon trade-offs between maintaining school closures for the betterment of public health and managing the adverse impact of closures on students’ safety, well-being and learning (Reimers and Schleicher, 2020). Preservice teachers on school placement were not shielded from this liminal situation and indeed, we suggest, many of them were at the coalface of it. Normal structures provide consistency, yet for Turner (1974), they can also be limiting and restrictive. Turner identifies the creative potential of anti-structure where liminality represents an egalitarian state that entails ambiguity but also has radical and transformative potential (Pöyhönen, 2018). Here social arrangements can be suspended (Bamber, Allen-Collinson and McCormack, 2017) and the status quo transcended allowing new allegiances and capacities to emerge. This, less explored, aspect of Turner’s anti-structure is called ‘communitas’ (Turner, 1969).