Managing Teachers as Professionals in Schools

Hugh Busher, Rene Saran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134985043
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This text examines the challenges facing education managers as the introduction of the National Curriculum, a number of Education Acts and the reorganization of management, have altered the concepts of teacher professionality and their statutory duties.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Schools for the Future

Hugh Busher and Rene Saran

Teachers in schools of the future

A vision of schools moving into the twenty-first century is that they are rapidly becoming centres of learning, not just for students but for all involved with the institution, including staff (both teaching and support staff), parents and members of the local community. This new role is not easily assumed by some teachers as they see learners primarily as students who are the recipients of knowledge which they transmit. It will be in addition to the other specified roles of staff, such as teacher, senior manager or site supervisor. This visionary view of schools points to an entirely new setting for the work of teachers, support staff and school governors. It has implications both for the management of teachers in schools and for understanding teacher professionality and staff development.

This vision is not far fetched. A review of school effectiveness research shows one of the 11 characteristics for such an institution to be ‘a learning organisation’ with ‘school-based staff development’ (Mortimore, 1995, p 11, citing Sammons etal, 1994).

A study by Wasley (1994) offers valuable insights into the lives and work of teachers who were changing their classroom practice to better meet the needs of their adolescent students by creating opportunities for independent individual and group learning. The epilogue to her book, Stirring the Chalk-dust: Tales of Teachers Changing Classroom Practice, refers to images of teachers in the midst of change:

Teaching is not easily transformed, nor is the transformation process something that one completes;… teaching is complex enough, compelling enough to provide teachers with a career of growth, change, and ever deeper understandings about how students are best supported. Teachers do not arrive. They do not learn everything there is to know about teaching. Although for some this is humbling, and for others discouraging, it also promises a career rich enough in complexity and potential inquiry to hold a professional’s interest for more years than a typical working lifespan allows … Teaching is … only for those who can - learn, hone, reflect and then investigate again.

(Wasley, 1994, pp 202-3)

The contributors to this book have addressed various aspects of teacher professionality against a background of a rapidly changing social, political and educational context. This represents a critical community of researchers, practitioners and consultants engaged in learning through draft writing, considering comments and producing final chapters that embrace the impact of political, trade union and curriculum issues on the management of staff in schools. We perceive this breadth as necessary for an understanding of schools as organisations. In order to develop a fully rounded analysis of the functions and processes of management in schools it is necessary to relate them to the central teaching and learning purposes of schools. It is difficult to understand either of these comprehensively without being aware of the pressures on schools from the socio-political environment.

Over time shifts of meaning and emphasis have occurred about the essence of professionalism. Professionals have been seen as people with certain traits who were self-governing and had autonomy and specific qualifications. Often they formed groups to protect their professional identity and preserve their livelihood but, in the main, they continued to work as self-employed individuals. Although teachers were not self-employed, except perhaps when working as a private tutor, those in secondary schools laid claim to academic expertise, and many throughout the last century claimed or demanded a qualification which they said was the equivalent of the training of other professionals, such as solicitors or churchmen. If working in organisations precluded people from being acknowledged as professionals then, today, many accountants, architects and doctors would be in danger of losing their professional status, which is clearly not the case.

Another hallmark of professionality is often said to be the special relationship between service provider and client. Mutual obligations are negotiated, involving moral obligations by the professional to deliver a service in a way which gives priority to the interests of the client, and which almost acquire the status of a social contract. The client has to pay an agreed fee for this service, which used to be negotiated directly with the professional when that person worked on their own account. Nowadays the fee is likely to be regulated by central government or professional bodies or negotiated by the client with the firm for which the professional works. In the event of negligence by the professional the client can, in theory, claim damages, although this might involve considerable legal costs.

Teachers, too, in a sense negotiate a contract with their clients, both with each of their students individually and with their students’ parents, agreeing to deliver a particular sort of curriculum, managed in certain ways to meet their students’ needs. Teachers and students strike bargains, though not legal contractual ones, about how each will behave and what each will do. For delivering their side of the bargain teachers are paid indirectly by their clients through the agency of the school governors out of the fees which pupils bring to a school, whether directly or indirectly through LEA age-weighted pupil formulae. Teachers who fail to deliver what their students expect of them may well find themselves in trouble, either suffering the consequences of student misbehaviour or of parent and student complaints to headteachers or school governors. Ultimately, proven professional incompetence could lead to dismissal.

The diversity of circumstances in which professionals work may account for the fact that contributors to this book reflect a range of perspectives about teacher professionalism. Some place more emphasis on the teacher as an individual while others explore the nature of professionalism resulting from the interaction between individuals and the school as an organisation. However there appears to be some sort of consensus that the developing shape of teacher professionalism in the twenty-first century will involve teachers working together more closely in teams in schools than they have done in the past, developing a more collegial culture than the fragmented or autocratic ones to which many have been subjected previously.

This emerging culture is being fostered by increased opportunities for professional development, which involves acts of reflection and critical enquiry by participants (at whatever level in an institution) about their own practices. It marks professional development off from more superficial processes of training driven only by short-term institutional needs. Even when staff undertake development together, reflection and enquiry can only be ultimately meaningful when something is transformed in the minds of the individual participants.

Shared common features of public services

Education is only one of the public services, albeit one of the highest spending ones. It shares certain characteristics with other public services, as do professionals working in both the public and private sectors. It was suggested by the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) in 1995 that ‘there is evidence that workloads are increasing generally for professional groups and that teachers are part of the broad trend.’ For teachers the main factor was the pressures resulting from the introduction of the National Curriculum and the related Standard Assessment Tests (STRB, 1995, para 153, p 43), to which the consequences of the increased administrative work generated by the introduction of local management of schools (LMS) should be added.

A 1994 survey showed the average number of hours teachers worked per week was 49 for classroom teachers and 55 and 61 respectively for primary and secondary headteachers (STRB, 1995, para 146, p 41). These average hours do not reflect the special intensity of teachers’ work. When comparing teachers’ workloads with that of other professionals it has to be borne in mind that teachers usually work with large groups of students for most of each working day, whereas doctors and solicitors, for example, usually deal with only one or two clients at a time. There is something special about having to cope with 30 clients simultaneously, both individually and collectively. It requires teachers to make huge numbers of decisions every day in response to a multitude of student demands, without losing sight of the aims, structure and purpose of a lesson.

Recent changes in the National Curriculum, brought about by the Dearing recommendations of 1994, should reduce the complexity of teachers’ work and lessen the number of decisions they have to make. The increased numbers of support staff being used in schools in some capacities, such as classroom assistants (STRB, 1995, p 40), as a result of budgetary decisions being taken by headteachers and school governors may also reduce teachers’ workloads to some extent. The latter, however, is also changing the nature of teachers’ work, requiring them more often now than formerly to supervise and manage adults working alongside them, as well as the students in the classroom.

The need for continuing professional development is also a common strand amongst professionals inside and beyond the public services. Nurses are allowed at least five study days a year. Under the Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Act (1987) teachers were given five days a year in school for school-focused training to supplement whatever other professional development they undertook in their own time. Doctors are required to undertake 30 hours per year further study. Architects and people employed in marketing expect to spend 35 hours a year on professional renewal or development.

The provision of education, like social services and health, is labour intensive - 70 per cent of school budgets are spent on teaching staff, a figure rising to 80 per cent when support staff are included. Where public services are ‘free’ or heavily subsidised at the point of delivery, as is education, the cost of staff will always add substantially to public expenditure, giving people in society an added incentive to be concerned about the efficiency of such services both as taxpayers and as users. Since the early 1980s central government in the UK has introduced a range of measures to curb public expenditure, including the extensive privatisation of public utilities, and to promote competition by public services to achieve cost savings and encourage fund raising.

An imposed market ideology is a further factor influencing the whole of the public sector since the early 1980s in the UK. It claims to serve efficiency and promote individual choice, ensuring that resources are distributed more precisely to meet expressed individual needs. However, this view overlooks doubts about the ability of everybody in society to make rational choices or to take advantage of particular choices even when they have made them. It would seem to run counter to the notions of equity which underpinned the establishment of the welfare state in the late 1940s, following the recommendations of the Beveridge Report during the Second World War.

Another feature shared by many public services is the paradoxes inherent in central government policy. On the one hand public services are subject to strong central control through legislation and financial constraints. On the other, power has been decentralised and/or delegated to local or institutional units (Busher and Saran, 1993), so that schools control resource allocation as do trust hospitals or funded GP practices within cash limited budgets. National levels of funding for institutions are tightly controlled by government departments or funding councils prescribing the formula or the amounts of money per service which local authorities may spend.

The granting of limited discretionary powers to local units to vary national agreements has not always been welcomed by trade unions because it threatens to unleash a flood of local bargaining. This may lead to people in different parts of the country being paid different rates for the same work, the situation facing teachers in different parts of the country in the early years of the twentieth century before national wage bargaining was established through the Burnham Committee. In 1995, nurses expressed widespread opposition to the implementation of local pay bargaining. Similarly, few schools have made use of governors’ discretionary powers over teachers’ pay.

In schools opposition to the use of pay flexibilities is based on disquiet over their divisive potential, not only between institutions but also within institutions. Teachers, trade unionists and governors have voiced grave concerns that performance-related pay for teachers would undermine the team work which seems to be essential for a school to be effective. Central government has made this situation worse by insisting that any performance-related pay awarded in schools should be for individual teachers’ performances rather than for particularly successful teams, such as a department, for example. The greater effectiveness of team work in industry - rather than individual competition between workers - is a widely recognised feature of recent management literature.

On the other hand the flexibility which financial delegation has given senior staff in institutions to use resources in ways which more closely match identified school needs is beginning to be appreciated by headteachers. The Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) has commented that the proportion of resources which schools spend on teaching staff should not necessarily be seen as a fixed cost for all time. A different allocation between different types of teaching and support staff could be considered (OFSTED, 1993, Part 5, Technical Papers, pp 52-3). For example, since LMS was introduced, the numbers of less expensive support staff and part-time teachers have risen at the same time as the numbers of the more experienced and more expensive full-time teachers have declined. The figures are quite striking. Between 1989 and 1994 the number of full-time teachers employed declined by 3 per cent while the number of part-time teachers rose by 26 per cent. Between 1991 and 1994 numbers of staff other than teachers in schools rose by 31 per cent (STRB, 1995, Table 2, p 11).

These changes have aroused considerable disquiet in schools. If the reason for changing a school’s staffing structure is merely to cut costs, squeezing out professional staff who are more expensive than less qualified auxiliaries, then it may endanger the quality of service a school delivers. If, on the other hand, a change in staffing structure means, for example, that teachers spend less time on administrative work and more time working with pupils, this could lead to an improvement in the quality of service offered.

The changing nature of teachers’ work

The main debates in this book revolve around notions of what is involved professionally in being a teacher. In the maintained sector of education, as well as teaching large classes of students, all teachers have to be concerned with aspects of developing whole school policies, with school development planning and with the management of the delegated budget, even if it is only within their departments.

The increasing use of adults other than teachers in classrooms is expanding the range of management responsibilities which teachers are having to accept. The statutory contract of employment imposed in 1987 made explicit teachers’ duty to manage people such as classroom assistants, technicians, and special needs support staff as part of managing the learning process for students.

Teachers are beginning to work increasingly in teams, a process that was fostered in the 1980s by the introduction of the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative. In some cases, teachers of not particularly high formal status in a school may well take responsibility for aspects of curriculum development; while in some science departments in secondary schools these teams include support staff such as laboratory technicians as well as teaching staff. All are expected to attend department meetings and contribute to the discussions on an equal basis.

Major themes of this book

There are four main themes which emerge from and through various chapters of this book. They are not mutually exclusive, but their different focuses bring to the fore different aspects of the debate about professionalism and the management of teachers as professionals in schools.

The first of these themes concerns the unstable environment in which schools operate, which has profoundly altered the working world of teachers since the early 1980s; another is the relationships between professional teachers as individuals and the school as an organisation. The third theme we discuss focuses on the styles of leadership and management which might be appropriate to schools as institutions supporting communities of learners, including teachers and parents as well as students. The fourth theme probes what might be meant by professionality in the late twentieth century.

The unstable environment

In exploring this theme it is useful to examine separately the impact of the external environment of a school on its processes from that of the internal environment and to note the interaction between them.

Since the mid-1980s there have been a great many changes imposed by central government on the w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Notes on Contributors
• Acronyms
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Schools for the Future
• Teachers as Professionals in the 1990s
• Chapter 2 Deskilling a Profession: Professionalism, Deprofessionalisation and the New Managerialism
• Chapter 3 Teaching as a Profession: The Changing Legal and Social Context
• Chapter 4 Changing Conceptions of a Profession
• Chapter 5 Teacher Union Perspectives on the Management of Professionals
• Chapter 6 Teacher Professionality and the National Curriculum: Management Implications
• The Institutional Focus
• Chapter 7 Leadership and Professional Development: Developing Reflective Practice
• Chapter 8 Values as Central to Competent Professional Practice
• Chapter 9 Developing Teachers as Extended Professionals
• Chapter 10 Working with Support Staff in Schools: Relationships between Teachers, Governors and other Staff
• Chapter 11 Managing Staff Professionally
• Index