The New Lives of Teachers

Christopher Day, Qing Gu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136944543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The New Lives of Teachers examines the varied, often demanding commitments on teachers' lives today as they attempt to pursue careers in primary and secondary education. Building upon Huberman's classic study, it probes not only teachers' everyday lives, but also the ways in which they negotiate the pitfalls of professional development and the different life and work 'scenarios' that challenge their sense of identity, well-being and effectiveness.

The authors provide a new evidence-based framework to investigate and understand teachers' lives. Using a range of contemporary examples of teaching, they demonstrate that it is the relative success with which teachers manage various personal, work and external policy challenges that is a key factor in the satisfaction, commitment, well-being and effectiveness of teachers in different contexts and at different times in their work and lives. The positive and negative influences upon career and professional development and the influences of school leadership, culture, colleagues and conditions are also shown to be profound and relate directly to teacher retention and the work-life balance agenda. The implications of these insights for teaching quality and teacher retention are discussed.

This book will be of special interest to teachers, teachers' associations, policy makers, school leaders, and teacher educators, and should also be of interest to students on postgraduate courses.

Part I
The contexts of teaching

Chapter 1
The new teaching environments

Introduction

The quality of teaching is determined not just by the ‘quality’ of the teachers – although that is clearly critical – but also the environment in which they work. Able teachers are not necessarily going to reach their potential in settings that do not provide appropriate support or sufficient challenge or reward.

(OECD, 2005: 9)

The schools in which teachers teach and the historical, social and policy contexts which mediate these, have always been important influences on their purposes and practices, their willingness and capacities to perform and to continue to perform to their best. This chapter examines changes in these broader contexts through the lens of economic, social and technological changes, and the effects of these upon teachers’ work.

A brief history of change: the drive for quality in an age of compliance

There are a number of key events that have changed forever the post-war environment in which teachers teach and students learn in England and Wales. Supported by claims of falling standards relative to those in competitor nations which were deemed to be incompatible with the need to increase economic competitiveness and social cohesion, successive governments have attempted to re-orientate the strong liberal-humanist traditions of schooling, characterised by a belief in the intrinsic, non-instrumental value of education, towards a more functional view, characterised by competency-based, results-driven teaching (Helsby, 1999: 16), payment by results and forms of indirect rule from the centre (Lawn, 1996). As part of this, they are said to have placed new limits on teachers’ autonomy. Under policies of decentralisation of the management of budgets, planning, staffing, student access and curriculum and assessment (Bullock and Thomas, 1997), they have reconfigured the conditions under which teachers work, putting into place a system that rewards most those who successfully comply with government directives and who reach government targets, and punishes those who do not.

Ball (2001) has described this central drive for quality and improvement as being embedded in three technologies – the market, managerialism and performativity (Lyotard, 1979) – and placed them in distinct contrast to the post-war, public welfarist state. Teachers, it is claimed, now work in a world where ‘being good’ is more important than ‘doing good’, and where trust in their professional judgements has been diminished, ‘in incremental steps over the past two decades, in inverse proportion to the rise in popularity of standardised testing, “objective” assessment and the codification and quantification of teachers’ knowledge and practice via professional standards’ (Groundwater-Smith and Mockler, 2009: 9).

Prior to this new work order in England and elsewhere, a compact had existed between government, parents and schools in which, by and large, teachers were trusted to do a good job with minimum direct intervention by government in matters of school governance, the school curriculum, teaching and learning, and assessment. Quality assurance (a term that didn’t exist in the 1970s) was provided by Her Majesty’s Inspectors (HMI), a relatively benign group of ex-teachers and lecturers who had become civil servants and who were charged with monitoring and maintaining standards through their connoisseurship judgements on quality. Local education authorities (LEAs) (recently renamed as local authorities (LAs), the equivalent of school districts) were still responsible for curriculum and professional support, and employed either school advisers or school inspectors – consisting, like HMI, of ex-heads and senior staff – to achieve this and monitor schools. Apart from a minimalist core curriculum, LEAs and schools were able to exercise considerable freedom with regard to the balance of the curriculum taught (although most secondary education conformed to a university-entrance-driven national examination system for students aged 16–18), and this was reflected in different opportunities for students who lived in different LEAs. Colleges of education, responsible for providing the bulk of new teachers – through four-year education degree courses – also exercised choice in their pre-service work, as did universities in their post-graduate one-year courses. Significantly, continuing professional development (CPD) opportunities were largely left to the choice of individual teachers; ‘teacher development’, rather than the ubiquitous ‘training’ descriptor, was a term widely used; and the curriculum in schools was ‘taught’, not ‘delivered’. Curriculum developments in schools were initiated and managed locally or by a national ‘Schools Council’, funded by government but governed by a partnership between teachers’ professional associations and government. ‘Value added’, ‘targets’, ‘accountability’, ‘training’, ‘performativity’, ‘audits’ and ‘performance management’ were not yet even twinkles in the eyes of policy makers. The nation’s primary (elementary) schools were the envy of the world and heads were the power in their own kingdoms, free to govern as they wished.

In 1988, all this changed:

Following the Education Act 1944 the only curriculum areas under centralised curriculum control in state-maintained schools in the UK used to be physical education and religious instruction, as well as the daily act of worship. The rest of the curriculum was a matter to be left to the judgement of the individual headteacher … advised … by the local authority … and by a governing body. Since the Education Act 1988 all that has now changed. There is in its stead a state-dictated curriculum … progress and achievement in all subjects are … monitored and assessed at regular intervals.

(Aspin, 1996: 55)

The new agenda

Why, then, did the relatively stable worlds of schools change? In responding to this question, it is important at the outset to recognise that what has happened to education is part of a larger ideological debate on the costs, management and cost effectiveness of the public services in general. Education as a public service in England has been a test bed for a raft of radical reforms that were born in the mid-1970s out of political, ‘new right’ ‘neoliberal’ ideology and economic pragmatism through which the post-Second World War monopoly of wisdom held by professionals in education, health and the social services was challenged.

A new ERA (Educational Reform Act) dawned in 1988.

This landmark piece of legislation represented the first substantial challenge to the system constructed at the end of World War Two, introducing to it such concepts as a national curriculum, local management of schools, grant maintained status and city technology colleges.

(Chitty, 1992: 31)

Not only did this significantly change the education system of England and Wales, but in doing so it cut a swathe through existing ‘progressive’ practices and those who had used them. The progressive ‘dinosaurs’ of the post-war generation were systematically slaughtered or put out to pasture as new policies for the entitlement of all children and public accountability of schools and teachers were developed. The closures of Risinghill School in the mid-1960s and William Tyndale School in the mid-1970s in England came to symbolise the end of so-called progressive education (King, 1983), and signalled the beginning of root-and-branch changes to the relationship between schools and government that were to permeate all aspects of teachers’ work. Since then, schools have learnt to adapt to the new educational environment in which curricula and teaching conform more closely to the requirements of the market and national policy guidelines.

A ‘new public management’ (Clarke and Newman, 1997: ix) was identified in which schools were opened to market pressures, given greater financial autonomy and expected to improve on a yearly basis in terms of both teacher and pupil performance. Such improvements (or otherwise) were, and still are, judged through independent external inspection; national testing of pupils at ages 11, 16 and 17, and, until 2008, national testing of pupils at age 14 in English, maths and science; and annual performance management reviews of individual teachers. ‘School effectiveness’, ‘school improvement’, ‘target setting’, ‘monitoring’ and ‘continuous (rather than continuing) professional development’ have become the new watchwords. League tables of results are now regularly featured in the media; parents are encouraged to choose the school to which they send their children; and school governors have been given more responsibilities as schools have become locally managed and centrally accountable.

To ensure that schools comply with these innovations they are now monitored by School Improvement Partners (SIPs); are locally set targets for pupil achievement within a national framework of targets; and undergo regular school inspections by Ofsted (The Office for Standards in Education), with its judgements based upon a national assessment framework and in the context of a self-evaluation form (SEF), which is produced annually by every school. There is a ‘naming’ and ‘shaming’ of schools that are categorised as being under ‘notice of improvement’ or in ‘special measures’, a status meaning schools are under notice of closure, with a limited time to demonstrate improvement. Successful schools and their heads are awarded ‘National Educational Leadership’ status and given more resources. Moreover, the recently introduced ‘Every Child Matters’ agenda (2004) has ensured that schools are now formally charged with improving the citizenship, ‘wellbeing’ and academic achievement of all their pupils. Little wonder that some teachers have become cynical about change.

In the United States a high-stakes testing regime has been established in order to ensure that schools engage in a state-determined improvement agenda for all students to meet a prescribed level of achievement on state-authorised tests. The message there, as in England, is clear: improve or be taken over or closed down. In a wide-ranging, three-year evaluation of the effects of such high-stakes testing on high schools in Texas and Kentucky, New York and Vermont, Siskin and her colleagues (Siskin, 2003) found that, although they had provided a new tightening up of the curriculum in certain areas and a new sense of purpose in teaching, the net effect had been the massive growth of expensive measures of testing and curriculum validation of traditional core subjects at the expense of those which were not. Whilst teachers and teacher unions had welcomed the introduction and development of new standards for curriculum and teaching, they were reported to have been dismayed by the quality and applicability of the new tests that form the basis for judging the value of their work. Moreover, not all agreed that these high-stakes testing measures, as in England, had contributed to improvements in pupil achievements, especially those in areas of socio-economic disadvantage. Indeed, in England, the claims by government that standards of pupil attainment have risen as a result of their reforms continue to be disputed by academics, who point to variations of less than 1 per cent in the performance of 11-year-olds once external factors are accounted for – such as prior attainment and family income (Teachers’ Educational Supplement (TES), 2006; Tymms et al., 2008); and, in the case of 15-year-olds once change of intake and the exclusion of ‘difficult’ pupils before they take the examinations (Gorard, 2006; TES, 31 March 2006) are taken into account. Despite an increase from £38 billion in 1998 to £82 billion in 2008, and a total expenditure in education of £650 billion between 1998 and 2008, it was reported in 2009 that one in six pupils left full-time compulsory education ‘without a single worthwhile qualification’, with 100,000 ‘without even one C grade in GCSE exams and, if English and Maths were included, more than half (850,000) without five good grades (A* to C) as judged by the government’s own benchmarks’ (Randall, 2009: 10).

In a recent retrospective review of government policy in England since the Education Reform Act of 1988, Shirley Williams, a widely respected former education secretary (1976–9) and Leader of the Liberal Democrats Party in the House of Lords (2001–4) commented:

Combining league tables with detailed central government prescription of the national curriculum gradually drove creativity and the joy of learning out of education.… This relentless regime, testing children more than anywhere else in the western world, is associated with a high fall-out rate. At 16, 24% of English children leave education. This is the highest proportion of any country in the European Union.

(Williams, 2009: 7)

She went on to note that, despite a ‘substantial’ spending increase of 29 per cent per pupil since 1995, comparative standards in reading, maths and science placed the United Kingdom ‘a little’ above the OECD averages. She concluded with this telling remark about teachers’ work and lives: ‘Teachers have been compelled to conform to a ceaseless flow of directions, regulations and notes for guidance. Not only has their professional autonomy been undermined; their morale, attested to by the annual inspectors’ reports, is persistently low’ (ibid.).

The ‘new’ age of professionalism

These regimes have changed what it means to be a teacher as the locus of control has shifted from the ind...

Table of contents

• Teacher quality and school development series
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I The contexts of teaching
• Part II The professional lives of teachers
• Part III Conditions for success
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index