Staff Relations During the Teachers' Industrial Action: context, conflict and proletarianisation

Abstract

Despite the considerable media time devoted to the teachers’ industrial dispute in England and Wales during 1985‐86 little or no effort was made to represent the conduct of the dispute in particular schools or through the experiences of individual teachers. The impression conveyed was of a uniform type of ‘action’ and similar effects in different schools, although some were reported as being ‘harder hit’ than others, that is more days on strike. In reality, although related to a set of general conditions affecting teachers’ work, the dispute was enacted and experienced very differently in different schools and localities. The conduct of the dispute in particular schools emerged from and was related to a variety of ‘local’ factors. In this paper some of these institutional variations are examined.

The paper consists of two sections. The first attempts to describe and analyse recent structural changes affecting the conditions of work of teaching and thus provide a context for the 1985‐86 industrial action in schools. The second section explores teachers’ interpretations of and involvements in the industrial action in particular schools. The data on which the paper is based were collected as part of a more general research study on school organisation and micro‐politics.