The politics of teaching as an occupation in the professional borderlands: the interplay of gender, class and professional status in a biographical study of trainee teachers in England

Abstract

A lack of esteem for teachers and the teaching profession is a central tenet underpinning policy reforms put forward by the 2010 UK Government White Paper ‘The Importance of Teaching’. This article argues that the policy problem and solutions presented in the White Paper lack awareness of the historical and social positioning of teaching. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 32 London-based secondary teacher training students from various social class and ethnic backgrounds, this paper asks how the profession is perceived and what sort of choice it is for the trainees. It employs a Bourdieusian lens and concepts of social and cultural capital to examine the interplay of gendered, classed and ‘raced’ biographies in relation to individuals’ decisions to become teachers. Understanding the social world as ‘accumulated history’, as Bourdieu does, stresses that experiences and outcomes are rooted and collected in a series of historical structures and functionings. The paper argues that the ambiguous status of the profession is both a function and an effect of its conceptualisation as feminised. It also asks whether the weak professional standing of teaching has further destabilising consequences in the present political moment where a string of neoliberal and neoconservative policy reforms reshape the profession.

Keywords:

• teaching profession
• policy reform
• biographies
• gender

Notes

1. A group of 24 research-intensive universities which are commonly regarded as the UK’s leading universities and which have comparatively high entry requirements for students.

2. Many small schools only had one certified teacher and perhaps one or more assistants.

3. This is a fairly unorthodox way of handling socio-economic class classifications which traditionally rely on social class being determined in relation to men, i.e. fathers and husbands.

4. Ten had teachers as parents and two interviewees had mothers who worked as classroom/learning support assistants.

5. She was due to start a PhD, but funding problems let her to pursue a PGCE instead.

6. A new two-year leadership programme for social work, ‘Frontline’, open to high-achieving graduates has been announced in June 2013 by the UK government, with first recruits planned to start the programme in 2014 (see www.thefrontline.org.uk).