Professionalism in Post-Compulsory Education and Training

Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives

Jonathan Tummons

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367583996
• eBook ISBN: 9780429789533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What does 'professionalism' mean for teachers and trainers in further education colleges or adult education centres? Over the last twenty years, ideas about professionalism and professional identity within the post-compulsory sector have been shaped and reshaped by successive policies, standards, and professional bodies. Yet, these ideas themselves remain controversial and continue to be the focus of debate as well as research.

This book gathers together a series of articles published over the last ten years, providing critical and research-based perspectives on professionalism within post-compulsory education and training. The twelve chapters that are presented here explore issues such as professional standards and continuing professional development and their impact on current definitions and frameworks of professionalism, as well as the policies that have shaped these processes. These are issues that are of relevance and importance not only to practitioners and researchers in the post-compulsory sector, but to anyone who is concerned with contemporary debates about what it means to be 'a professional' in education and training. The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Research in Post-Compulsory Education.

Performativity and professional development: the gap between policy and practice in the English further education sector

Kevin Orr

The New Labour government identified the further education (FE) sector as a vehicle to deliver its central policies on social justice and economic competitiveness in England, which has led to a torrent of initiatives that have increased central scrutiny and control over FE. Although the connections between social justice, economic competitiveness and education are hegemonic in mainstream British politics, they are unfounded. Therefore, FE can only fail to deliver fully the government’s central programme. Thus, a gap exists between policy initiatives and practice in colleges even, paradoxically, where reforms are ostensibly successful. In order to illustrate this gap and how it is maintained this paper considers one specific reform: the statutory obligation for teachers in English FE colleges to undertake 30 hours of continuing professional development (CPD) annually. Evidence from small-scale exploratory research suggests that this initiative has had little impact on patterns of CPD, though the government’s quantifiable targets are being systematically met. This paper argues that a symbiosis of performativity has evolved where the government produces targets and colleges produce mechanisms to ‘evidence’ their achievement, separate to any change in practice and thus maintaining the gap between policy and practice.

Introduction

‘Whatever else you could say about Labour’s educational policies there is certainly no shortage of them’ (Ball 2008, 86).

Over three million learners (Foster 2005, vi) attend English further education (FE) colleges which are part of a heterogeneous sector that has been described as what is not school and not university (Kennedy 1997, 1), though even those boundaries are becoming less defined. It remains the sector where the majority of vocational training and adult education takes place, as well as academic study between the ages of 16 and 18. The New Labour government, elected in 1997, identified FE as a means to deliver two central policies in England: social justice through widening participation in education; and enhancing national economic competitiveness through improving the workforce’s skills (Orr 2008). Therefore, while previous governments largely neglected FE (Lucas 2004, 35), New Labour has increasingly scrutinised and controlled colleges and staff; a process which is apparent in the government’s Workforce Strategy for the Further Education System in England, 2007–2012 (Lifelong Learning UK [LLUK] 2008a). This strategy includes the introduction of a statutory annual period of continuing professional development (CPD) for teachers in FE colleges, on which this paper focuses. From September 2007 each teacher must carry out and record 30 hours of CPD each year in order to maintain their licence to practise (Institute for Learning [IfL] 2009, 14).

Finlay et al. (2007, 138) describe policy as a ‘loose term’ which includes: ‘value commitments, strategic objectives and operational instruments and structures at national, regional, local and institutional levels’.

Such a catholic understanding of policy is necessary within FE where there is a plethora of national and local agencies, bodies and institutions. As part of their wide-raning and detailed research into the impact of policy in the learning and skills sector in England, Coffield et al. (2008, 15–17) created an organigram of the sector which they describe as looking ‘more like the chart of the internal wiring of an advanced computer than the outline of a “streamlined”, coherent sector’. This complexity has arisen partly because of the diversity of the sector and its conflicting constituencies (Coffield et al. 2007, 735), but also because policy has been laid on policy, and for New Labour that has meant organisation laid upon organisation. So, CPD in FE over the past decade has been under the direction of five different government departments and at least five different government-funded agencies. Besides these is the nominally independent professional body for teaching staff in FE, the IfL, whose website (IfL 2008) helpfully contains 250 acronyms used in the sector. Note, though, that IfL ‘do not expect [this list] to be comprehensive’. Such complexity itself becomes an important factor in the implementation of any policy initiative.

Using definitions developed by Steer et al. (2007, 177) policy drivers are the broadly described aims while a policy lever, is ‘shorthand for the wide array of functional mechanisms through which government and its agencies seek to implement policies’. The use of targets for FE colleges is one such policy lever. In order to demonstrate how policy levers become detached from the changes they are meant to force, I consider the targets related to the CPD reform. This reform demonstrates three aspects of the government’s approach to FE. Firstly, efforts to direct the sector closely have had the effect of reducing professional autonomy and trust by increasing centralised accountability. Secondly, the means to measure the initiative’s success have diverged from the intended change in colleges as systems to record the achievement of targets are introduced and prioritised. Finally, despite its ostensible success through achievement of targets, the initiative has changed little in practice.

This paper draws on small-scale qualitative research into the introduction of compulsory CPD to demonstrate how a symbiosis of performativity has evolved from government reforms, which indicates how the gap between national initiatives and local practice is perpetuated. Questionnaires were submitted to 42 human resources managers, teacher-trainers and others who identified themselves as having responsibility for staff development and CPD at FE organisations in the north of England in October 2008. This was just over a year after the introduction of the CPD initiative. Twenty-nine completed questionnaires were returned from staff at 21 organisations. These questionnaires sought their attitudes towards compulsory CPD and descriptions of how their organisations were implementing the reform. Participants were specifically asked to describe how their organisation was demonstrating achievement of the government’s targets relating to CPD. This research provides a snapshot picture of the early trajectory of the CPD reform, which suggests how national policy can be distorted by local implementation and by the need to demonstrate achievement of targets. Before discussing the findings from these local FE organisations in more detail, I consider the development of national policy for FE which has shaped how those organisations responded to the CPD reform.

EE policy under New Labour

Tomlinson (2001, 112) stressed the ‘continuities and similarities’ between the approaches to post-16 education of the Conservative and New Labour governments, but the new government recognised the need for reform in the 1999 White Paper, Learning to Succeed: A New Framework for Post-16 Learning:

There is too much duplication, confusion and bureaucracy in the current system. Too little money actually reaches learners and employers, too much is tied up in bureaucracy. There is an absence of effective co-ordination or strategic planning. The system has insufficient focus on skill and employer needs at national, regional and local levels. (Department for Education and Employment [DfEE] 1999, 21)

Apparently, FE was broken and needed fixing before it could carry New Labour’s policies, which led to the current government spending more time and effort on the sector than any previous one. In 2004 Lucas (2004, 35) wrote:

It is probably true that in the last five years or so there has been more regulation and government policy concerned with raising the standards of teaching in further education than ever before.

The same statement could be made about the five years that followed for reasons that lie at the heart of the New Labour project. Hall (2003, 6) accused New Labour of speaking ‘with forked tongue’ by rhetorically combining economic neo-liberalism with their more social-democratic strand. However, for New Labour the connections between education and training, economic growth and social justice are simply unquestionable. These connections, considered more fully later, are rhetorically positioned to be unassailable and so broach no argument nor require any evidence because there is, apparently, no alternative. Smith (1994, 37; cited in Avis 2003, 317) describes the process of hegemony, which can be related to educational policy in this area:

A hegemonic project does not dominate political subjects: it does not reduce political subjects to pure obedience and it does not even require their unequivocal support for its specific demands. It pursues, instead, a far more subtle goal, namely the vision of the social order as the social order itself.

To describe a political project as hegemonic, then, is not to say that a majority of the electorate explicitly supports its policies, but to say that there appears to be no other alternative to this project’s vision of society.

The orthodoxy that makes education an aspect of economic policy is part of what Ball (1999, 204, original emphasis) has called a ‘powerful, coherent policyscape’, where social justice is aligned with economic competitiveness, as apparent in New Labour’s statements. David Blunkett, the first New Labour Secretary of State for Education, wrote in the foreword to the government Green Paper in 1998:

Learning is the key to prosperity – for each of us as individuals, as well as for the nation as a whole. Investment in human capital will be the foundation of success in the knowledge-based global economy of the twenty-first century. This is why the Government has put learning at the heart of its ambition. (DfEE 1998, 1)

Seven years later in 2005 Bill Rammell, then British minister of state for Higher Education and Lifelong Learning claimed: ‘Further Education is the engine room for skills and social justice in this country’ (Learning and Skills Council 2005, 1), and he was among ministers who welcomed the Leitch Review of Skills published in 2006 which asserted: ‘where skills were once a key driver of prosperity and fairness, they are now the key driver’ (Leitch 2006, 46, original emphases). That same year Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote in the foreword to a Government White Paper:

Our economic future depends on our productivity as a nation. That requires a labour force with skills to match the best in the world...

The colleges and training providers that make up the Further Education sector are central to achieving that ambition... But at present, Further Education is not achieving its full potential as the powerhouse of a high skills economy. (Department for Education and Skills [DfES] 2006)

This extract indicates the continued importance to the government of the economic role of FE, though exactly what ‘high skills’ are is not specified, and it indicates that ministers still considered FE not to be working properly. The perceived failure of FE to achieve ‘its full potential’ led to increasing the centralised accountability of FE teachers, which Morris (2001, 26) celebrated in relation to school teachers in a speech made while she was Minister of Education:

We do now have an accountable profession. Performance tables, the inspection system, performance management, examination and assessment arrangements, procedures for tackling school weaknesses, all contribute to the effective accountability of teachers and headteachers.

The Workforce Strategy for the Further Education System in England, 2007–2012, which includes mandatory annual CPD, can be understood within this context of perceived failure leading to increased accountability. One important element of this strategy is the New Overarching Professional Standards for Teachers, Tutors and Trainers in the Lifelong Learning Sector, which contain 190 statements of the ‘skills, knowledge and attributes’ (LLUK 2006, ii) required by those who work in the sector, including a commitment to: ‘[u]sing a range of learning resources to support learners’ (LLUK 2006, 4); and the requirement to ‘[s]tructure and present information clearly and effectively’ (LLUK 2006, 5). The length of these standards and their banal specification of practice contrast unfavourably with the equivalent documents covering the schools and HE sectors which briefly set out broad professional values and do not attempt to prescribe classroom activities (Orr 2008, 103). The content and tenor of the documents that relate to FE suggest what Avis (2003, 315) termed ‘a truncated model of trust’, but why do policymakers treat FE in such a manner? Certainly this most heterogeneous sector is important to the government, as I have argued, yet Coffield et al. (2008, 4) argue that those with authority fail to understand the sector because, ‘with a few exceptions, neither they nor their children have ever passed through it’. For the same reason the FE sector does not have the lobbying strength of schools and universities and so is more susceptible to the activities of new ministers wishing to make their own mark. Nonetheless, while legislation has rained down upon FE there is a gap between what may be planned by government reform and what it achieves in practice as one initiative demands another to achieve what the former failed to. This pattern results from the government’s ideological investment in the links between education and training, social justice and economic competitiveness.

Despite its hegemony in mainstream British politics, this conjoining of educational, economic and social policy has been subject to excoriating criticism from, among others, Coffield (1999), Rikowski (2001) and Avis (2007), who have found that the orthodoxy has no foundation in evidence. Reporting on a recent major research project into education, globalisation and the knowledge economy, Brown, Lauder and Ashton (2008, 17) found that ‘while the skills of the workforce remain important, they are not a source of decisive competitive advantage’. Moreover, they found that the expansion of access to Higher Education (HE) in the UK ‘has failed to narrow income inequalities even amongst university graduates’. Therefore, the government is subjecting FE to ever-greater scrutiny and accountability for what cannot be accomplished through education and training alone. There is a fundamental discrepancy between the government’s intention for FE and what FE can achieve, no matter how efficient the sector is. The White Paper in which Blair wrote the foreword quoted previously was also the document that first introduced compulsory CPD for all staff in FE; another means to fix a broken FE sector.

CPD and workforce strategy

The shift from voluntary to compulsory CPD in FE is only the most prominent aspect of The Workforce Strategy which:

...is intended to help shape the further education workforce of the future in England. By providing a national framework, it is intended to support all colleges and learning providers to implement their own local workforce plans to support the delivery of excellent provision for young people, adults and employers. (LLUK 2008a, 6)

The government minister Bill Rammell (LLUK 2008a, 4) praised the progress of staff in FE in his foreword to the initiative before warning that given current and future developments: ‘All those who lead and work in the sector will need to move up a gear’. David Hunter, chief executive of LLUK (LLUK 2008a, 5) wrote in his foreword: ‘There is already much success to celebrate and the Further Education Sector workforce can be rightly proud of its achievements to date. But more still is necessary’.

Part of this ‘gear change’ or ‘necessary more’ is the annual 30 hours of CPD, but like democracy and the pursuit of happiness, professional development is universally celebrated as something good, with little analysis of what it entails. Trorey (2002, 2; original emphasis) distinguishes between ‘institutional development’ aimed at improving a whole organisation, often described as ‘staff development’ and the more individual ‘professional development’ involving ‘pedagogic knowledge and subject expertise’. There is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: what does it mean to be 'a professional'?
• Part I: Professionalism – standards and policies
• Part II: Professional Identities
• Part III: Constructions of Professionalism
• Index