Appropriating professionalism: restructuring the official knowledge base of England’s ‘modernised’ teaching profession

Abstract

The present paper examines efforts by government and government agencies in England to prescribe and control the knowledge base of a teaching profession that has, under successive New Labour administrations since 1997, been subjected to ‘modernisation’. A theoretical framework drawn from aspects of the work of Basil Bernstein, and of Rob Moore and Lynn Jones, is drawn upon to examine in some detail one key aspect of this ongoing process of governmental appropriation of professionalism: the specification by the Training and Development Agency for Schools of new ‘standards’ for both initial teacher training and teachers’ subsequent career progression. It is argued that although this enterprise represents itself as a species of purely common‐sense reform, it is in fact a mode of competency training that is rooted in selective appropriation of elements of post‐fordist management theory and a loose form of behaviourist psychology. The capacity of this training discourse to suppress awareness of its own presuppositions and of alternative or competing conceptions of professions and professionalism is explored.

Keywords:

• professional
• professionalism
• accountability
• teacher training
• standards
• competency approaches

Notes

1. The Teacher Training Agency for England and Wales was a government agency established by the 1994 Education Act with powers to advise on and in some respects prescribe ‘Standards’ for courses of initial teacher training, and later, for programmes of continuing professional development for teachers and headteachers. It was also the funding agency for teacher training courses and related activities. In 2007 it became the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA).

2. Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education, was brought into being by the 1992 Education Act and the Schools Inspection Regulations of 1993. It replaced the school inspection functions in England and Wales previously performed by Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. As a non‐ministerial department of government, Ofsted is a less independent body than was Her Majesty’s Inspectorate. Ofsted also has responsibility for inspecting standards in both further education and in teacher training.

3. Certain temporal positionings are evident in some aspects of New Labour’s efforts to win teachers over to its new vision of professionalism. For example, a Green Paper published just one year into the new millennium sought to welcome teachers into a new ‘partnership’ with government, because they had (it was claimed) shown their readiness to accept ‘modernisation’:

 Teaching, by contrast is already in many ways a 21^st century profession. More perhaps than any other, the teaching profession accepts accountability, is open to the contributions that others can make and is keen to seek out best practice… Growing acceptance of accountability means that the relationship between teachers and Government can build more than ever before on trust… In this climate, in partnership with teachers, we will take forward the agenda of reform … and complete the modernisation of the teaching profession. (Department for Education and Employment 2001, para. 5.4)

The significance of such temporal positionings – locating compliance with government projects as ‘progressive’, as ‘the future’; and resistance to them as ‘reactionary’, as ‘the past’ – is discussed more fully in Beck (2006, 2008b), and in Clarke et al. (2007, 150).

4. Although, as has already been emphasised, this is not the narrowly behaviouristic psychology that informed youth training discourses in the 1980s.

5. The restructuring of initial teacher training under successive Conservative and Labour Governments since the late 1980s has increasingly marginalised those areas of educational theory that have the capacity to enable students to develop a more informed and autonomous understanding of their professional lives and duties – notably the ‘education disciplines’ of history, philosophy and sociology of education. It is significant here that such disciplines were not formally excluded from Initial Teacher Training; their marginalisation resulted ‘merely’ from the restructuring of training around competency approaches and school‐based learning – leaving almost no space for them. The case of psychology of education is different, in that elements of this field have been retained, and even developed, because they are seen as offering ‘useful’ knowledge.

6. This was accomplished through certain provisions in the 1998 Teaching and Higher Education Act.

7. As Brunsson, Jacobsson, and associates (2000) have pointed out, many different sorts of groups in the modern world seem bent on promoting the extension of standards across an ever‐widening set of areas of human and institutional activity, and sometimes on a global scale. Their analysis mainly focuses on the activity of ‘standardizers’ who are either private individuals, private‐sector organisations, or international non‐governmental organisations, although they do not wholly neglect the role of state agencies. It is difficult to judge how far the deployment of standards discourses by agencies of the state in England has been shaped by this wider phenomenon, although it is almost certainly facilitated by these wider trends. Not all processes of standardisation, however, involve the kinds or degree of coercive prescriptiveness that the standards for teacher training discussed in this article embody.

8. Various aspects of this analysis were anticipated more than 20 years ago by philosopher of education Charles Bailey in his discussion of the forms of accountability appropriate to liberal educators (1984, ch. 11). See also Ian Frowe’s (2005) recent philosophical discussion of ‘professional trust’.