‘The very best generation of teachers ever’: teachers in post-2010 ministerial speeches

ABSTRACT

This article explores how teachers were discursively positioned in England following the formation of the Coalition government in 2010, using a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of 363 speeches produced by government ministers. Findings show that young teachers were privileged in post-2010 government discourse, constructed as valued and active social agents. Experienced teachers, however, were constructed as passive and deficient, albeit useful for training new teachers. The findings indicate the deployment of a biopolitical apparatus which sought to hierarchically distinguish between different groups of teachers in order to facilitate system reform.

KEYWORDS:

• Education policy
• conservative
• teacher identity
• corpus-assisted discourse analysis
• Foucault
• new teachers
• initial teacher training

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my thanks to Paul Baker and Alison Kington, who provided feedback on an early draft of this paper. I am also grateful to Andrew Wilkins and to the three anonymous reviewers who participated in the peer review process, whose constructive criticism proved invaluable in improving the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is worth noting that policy actors in universities and schools significantly mitigated the impact of School Direct (Ellis and Spendlove 2020).

2. Damian Hinds’ tenure as Education Secretary was ongoing when the data collection phase of this research project ended in March 2018.

3. 359 speeches were delivered by senior or junior ministers working within the DfE. Four speeches were produced by the Prime Minister or Deputy Prime Minister, one by the Schools Commissioner (Elizabeth Sidwell), and one by the Chief Executive of the National College of Teaching and Leadership (Charlie Taylor). These speeches were included in the DFEMS corpus as they were published on the DfE website in the same manner as speeches produced by education ministers.

4. e.g., true love; hard work

5. e.g., can I have a; as a result of

6. An example of this effect in the research presented in this paper is the tendency of government ministers to refer to specific individuals by name, as can be seen in Table 5. Sajid Hussain and David Benson were both specifically named by government ministers, positioned as ‘ideal types’ of teachers who both embrace and embody government policy objectives.

7. The number of lexical bundles found in Table 2 (n = 30) does not correspond with the number present in the concordance (n = 29, Table 4). This is a result of Wordsmith using different procedures to sort lexical bundles in the wordlist and concordance functions (Scott 2020).

8. As part of the wider project a collocation analysis on new teacher(s) was performed. There were 35 occurrences of the collocation new teacher(s) in the DFEMS corpus, of which one involved a negative positioning, 15 involved a positive positioning and 19 involved a neutral positioning. In brief, the pattern identified was therefore one in which new teachers were more often positioned in a positive manner than a negative one, supporting concordance analysis conducted on the collocation young teacher(s), described in more detail in the present paper.

9. The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) is responsible for inspecting state schools. Until 2017, Ofsted inspectors would grade individual lessons they had observed. In 2017 this practice was abolished by Ofsted, but continued to be used by some headteachers to assist in performance management. These categories were still used to grade schools.

10. Free Schools are a type of independent state funded school in England. They are similar to academies, but are all new schools rather than conversions from school previously maintained by the local authority. New Free Schools can be proposed by teachers, parents, charities or other organisations (DfE, 2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathryn Spicksley

Kathryn Spicksley is a PhD student and associate lecturer at the University of Worcester. Her research explores the discourses and identities of early career teachers working in primary academy schools, and is heavily influenced by speech act theory and pragmatics. Prior to studying for her PhD, Kathryn worked as an early years teacher in primary schools across the UK.