PRESSURE, BUREAUCRACY, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND ALL FOR SHOW: IRISH PERSPECTIVES ON LIFE INSIDE ENGLAND’S SCHOOLS

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a comprehensive account of Irish teachers’ perspectives on life inside schools in England, as reported in empirical studies. The research literature shows that Irish teachers report experiencing intense pressure from the inspectorate, but also internally as a consequence of the demands placed on English schools. Within these low-trust environments they experience what they feel to be unsustainable and time-consuming workloads which compound and perpetuate the pressure and stress they feel. Of most significance are Irish teachers’ views on the motives of English schools, which they interpret and perceive to be dictated by and for the inspectorate as opposed to serving the best interests of students. Overall, Irish teachers’ experiences in English schools are shaped by the overarching and inescapable pressures of high-stakes accountability and are far from positive.

Keywords:

• accountability
• workload
• stress
• England

8. Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 An exception to this has been the research exploring special educational needs in Ireland and England (see Day et al., 2012; Rose and O’Neill, 2009; Shevlin and Rose, 2008).

2 Additional countries are also often included in these studies with very few focusing solely on Ireland and England.

3 Sir Michael Wilshaw, a former headteacher, developed somewhat of a reputation for his controversial views during his time as England’s Chief Inspector of Schools (2012–2016). Wilshaw’s words used in this paper come from a speech he made ‘before officially taking up his Ofsted post’ and which were publicised by the Guardian when he began his reign in January 2012: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/jan/23/chief-inspector-schools-michael-wilshaw

4 This is a term often used by scholars in Ireland to convey the sense of professional autonomy exercised, or at least previously exercised, by the country’s teachers. It emanates from an oft-cited 1991 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report which according to O’Grady et al. (2018) positioned the national teaching culture as being removed from any professional accountability and concluded that teachers’ ‘autonomy in the classroom is legendary’. While, almost three decades later, Irish teachers’ autonomy is no longer ‘legendary’ it is perhaps fair to maintain that Irish teachers continue to enjoy a more favourable autonomy/accountability balance than their counterparts in many other countries, and particularly their English neighbours.

5 One imagines that teachers from England would also find aspects of Irish education daunting too, and especially the status of Ireland’s equivalent to the A Levels. The ‘iconic status accorded to Leaving Certificate results for individual students and their schools year after year’ (Conway and Murphy, 2013) has seen it become ‘somewhat of a cultural phenomenon in Ireland’ (Skerritt, 2017). According to Baird et al. (2015), the media interest in the Leaving Certificate examination in Ireland differs from other countries in the volume of coverage it receives and in the detail of the analysis of the examination questions e.g. the topics covered, wording and structure. As recently reported by McCormack et al. (2020), the coverage is often instrumentalist and technical in nature, and a consensualist view of Irish students is reflected in the assumption that all wish to progress to higher education.

6 It is worth referring to the power of the teacher unions in Ireland, and particularly when compared with the unions in England in the late twentieth century. As Drudy and Lynch (1993, p. 115) asserted at the time, relative to unions in Britain ‘Irish teachers are extremely well organised and influential’. More recently, Gleeson (2010, p. 250) has referred to the view of Prof Malcolm Skilbeck, one of the authors of the 1991 OECD report, that ‘the strength of the teacher unions in Ireland was well above the international average, in sharp contrast with England where anti-union ideology prevailed’.

7 All submitted responses can be viewed on the Department of Education and Skills’ website here: https://www.education.ie/en/Schools-Colleges/Information/Advancing-School-Autonomy-in-Ireland/submissions/

8 It must be pointed out that while the dominant trend was for Irish teachers to perceive schools in England as having questionable motives, it was not uncommon for them to also perceive some of their colleagues in England as being more focused on their own individual needs as opposed to the needs of their students (see Skerritt, 2019a, 2019b, 2020).