Temps in teaching: the role of private employment agencies in a changing labour market for teachers

Abstract

This paper explores the emergence of teacher employment agencies and the increased volume of employment agency business in teaching. It examines the role of agencies in quasi-educational markets, and the relationship between agency teaching and understandings about teachers' work. Drawing upon exploratory research conducted at the University of Warwick, the author analyses documents and interviews with agency representatives from a range of agencies of differing size and complexity. Agencies are seen as part of a wider agenda that includes the marketization and privatization of schooling that begins to mirror what is already occurring within the FE sector. This includes emerging local markets for agencies and supply teachers, and agencies' relations with schools and unions are considered. Paradoxically, agency teachers are shown to underpin aspects of educational policy and practice in which they, and for the most part, the agencies who supply them, have, until recently, remained either implicit or invisible. By raising basic issues about whose interests are being served by agencies, the paper takes initial steps in reducing that invisibility.