Industrial Relations in Education

Transforming the School Workforce

Bob Carter, Howard Stevenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135169060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

All phases of education from pre-school to post-compulsory, in virtually all parts of the world, have experienced unprecedented reform and restructuring in recent years. Restructuring has largely been driven by a global agenda that has promoted the development of human capital as the key to economic competitiveness in the global market.

This book adopts an inter-disciplinary approach drawing not only on education research but also from the fields of industrial sociology, management studies and labour process theory to locate the reform agenda within a wider picture relating to teachers, their professional identities and their experience of work. In doing so the book draws on critical perspectives that seek to challenge orthodox policy discourses relating to remodelling.

Illustrating of how education policy is shaped by discourses within the wider socio-political environment and how unionization and inter-organizational bargaining between unions exerts a decisive, but often ignored, influence on policy development at both a State and institutional level, this book is a must read for anyone researching or studying employment relations.

1
Teachers’ Work and Teacher Unions

The Global Context

INTRODUCTION

In recent years the work of schoolteachers in English and Welsh State schools has been subject to considerable restructuring, often presented in the name of workforce reform or ‘workforce remodelling’ (Ball 2008, Butt and Gunter, 2007). Significantly, the focus of the debates about remodelling has not been restricted to teachers, but has extended to the whole of the school workforce, and there has been suggestion of nothing less than the ‘transformation’ of the traditional roles undertaken by both teachers and support staff in schools (DfES 2002). Workforce remodelling has been seen as a key initiative in the continued drive to raise school standards through the more effective and efficient deployment of labour in schools, whilst simultaneously addressing problems of teacher recruitment arising from excessive teacher workload. School workforce remodelling, and the ‘new professionalism’ agenda for teachers that emerged from it (Rewards and Incentive Group 2005), have had a substantial and significant impact on the subsequent development of schools, and the work of teachers. This volume provides an exploration of the policies associated with workforce remodelling, and wider issues of workforce reform in schools, and locates these in the broader context of neo-liberal State restructuring and New Labour’s commitment to ‘modernise’ public services. Specifically the work has two broad aims: first, it provides an assessment and analysis of recent development in teacher trades unionism and school sector industrial relations in England. It does so by exploring teacher union engagement with the policy of workforce remodelling and offering an analysis of how teacher unions both shape policy and are shaped by policy. Second, the work seeks to make explicit connections between the way teachers experience work (the labour process of teaching) and developments in the strategy and form of teacher trade unions. This volume thereby avoids a narrow focus on teacher unionism as an activity disconnected from the realities of teachers’ work, linking developments in teacher unionism with school teaching as a very specific form of work.

Too often teacher unions are omitted from studies of education policy, and their influence on the processes of change are underestimated or ignored, even by authors with little sympathy for the managerial orientation of the Government (see, for instance, Ball 2008). A particular feature of workforce remodelling in England and Wales has been the central role that teachers’ unions have played in its development. Emphasising the need to focus on policy as both process and product (Taylor et al. 1997), workforce remodelling has not only sought to effect substantial change in schools, but has also brought forth a new model of industrial relations in the school sector. Teacher unions, and unions representing support staff in schools, have joined forces with a range of employer representatives to form a ‘Social Partnership’ in which all parties seek to work together to explore agreed solutions to what are presented as common problems.

Neither the reforms that workforce remodelling has generated, nor the industrial relations model it has spawned, however, have proven straightforward. Key elements of the substantive content of workforce reform, and the model of social partnership itself, have provoked deep division within the teaching profession and these divisions have been played out in the policies and the actions of different teacher unions (Stevenson 2007b). This book explores these developments in school sector industrial relations in England and begins to evaluate the wider significance of the partnership model of industrial relations for teacher trade unionism. It does so by examining the link between workforce reforms and changing forms of industrial relations at three distinct ‘levels’ of the policy environment—at national, local and institutional levels—and seeks to locate these developments in a wider global context. The research material presented is based on an Economic and Social Research Council-funded project conducted between 2006 and 2008 (Workforce remodelling, teacher trade unionism and school-based industrial relations, RES-062–23–0034A). In this study data was collected at each of the three levels of analysis—central government, local authority and at individual institution level—by looking at case study schools in both the primary and secondary sectors. Within the book there are discrete chapters that explore each of these levels in detail. Although the reform agenda has been implemented across England and Wales there are differences between the two national contexts and, as our data were collected solely in England, comments and analysis are restricted to the development of workforce reform in England.

However, before presenting this data some of the key theoretical frameworks that inform our analysis are outlined. In particular, this case study from England is located in a wider, global context. The remainder of this chapter highlights and develops three central themes that underpin the analysis of the research, before locating these themes within an English context in the following chapter. The three themes are:

• The insistence that developments described in this study, located in England, take place in a global environment and in particular within a specific form of globalisation which is dominated by neo-liberal ideology. Workforce remodelling in England is a national policy shaped by a specific international environment, but also one capable of exerting in turn significant influence in other national contexts (Fitzgerald 2007).

• The recognition that teaching is work, and that those who undertake teaching are workers involved in a labour process. This utilisation of labour process analysis acknowledges that teaching takes place within a very specific set of social relations and that it is important not only to understand what teachers do and how teachers’ work is regulated, but to understand how teachers’ work is changing and how these changes are linked to wider policy contexts.

• The conviction that the neo-liberal restructuring of State education, and its concomitant impact on teachers’ labour process, will not go unchallenged. A central thesis of this volume is that educational reform is political and contested. Reaction to reform may take many forms, but, in a context where very large numbers of teachers are unionised, then it is not only likely, but also inevitable, that teachers will engage with educational reform, directly or indirectly, through their unions. This is not to assert that teacher unions are uniform, nor that turning to them is the only, or even the default, response of teachers as they engage with the issues that face them in their working lives. However, it is to argue that understanding teacher union engagement with education reform is central to understanding how globally driven education reforms are played out in different countries (Stevenson 2007a).

In the following sections each of these three themes, and the links between them, are elaborated as the basis of subsequent chapters.

GLOBALISATION, NEO-LIBERALISM AND THE RESTRUCTURING OF SCHOOLS

There is nothing intrinsically new about the movement of people, materials, goods and services around the world and across borders. However, such movements now take place on a scale, and with such rapidity, that the claim is frequently made that qualitative changes have occurred—we now live in an age of ‘globalisation’. Globalisation can take many forms (Bottery 2006) but a core belief is that developments in transport and technological communications in particular allow for the rapid global movement of everything from people to information. Whilst it is true to assert that many of these developments are facilitated by advances in technology, it is important to recognise that ‘globalisation’ is not simply about the movement of goods, services, capital and labour across national borders, but is also about the location of power, and in particular the transfer of power from some nation-states to supra-national institutions (Green 1997). Although these institutions operate internationally, the dominance of individual nations, most notably the US (Ryner 2007), highlights the complex relationship between existing forms of geopolitics and new forms of globalisation. Contemporary globalisation is therefore not the product of a set of value-neutral technological breakthroughs, but is a political phenomenon driven by a specific set of social relations. In its current form, globalisation reflects the dominance of capital and the ascendancy of a range of ideas associated with neo-liberalism. Although the dominance of neoliberalism has been challenged by the recent global economic crisis, there is little evidence that the forward march of neo-liberalism has been fundamentally halted. Whilst some on the left have argued that the problems of the world economy caused by the implosion of the banking system herald the prospect of neo-liberalism’s demise (Milne 2008), our belief is that a more sober assessment is required. Whilst economic crisis clearly opens up opportunities to challenge the logic of contemporary capitalism, the inability to articulate and mobilise around a coherent political alternative leaves the neo-liberal orthodoxy largely intact. In the meantime the imperative of what has become known as the Global North (Fletcher and Gapasin 2008) to cross borders, to remove barriers to trade, to weaken the power of the nation-states of the Global South and to undermine the power of organised labour, continues to be driven by capital’s need to secure resources and to develop low cost sources of production combined with the pursuit of new and expanded markets for the sale of goods and services.

Globalisation in its current form is itself an outcome of earlier economic and political crises of the advanced capitalist economies that occurred unevenly between the late 1960s and mid-1970s. Symptoms included a fiscal crisis of the State (O’Connor 1973) and a decline in profitability caused by increased international competition, particularly from Japan (Brenner 1998). Keynesianism, as an essentially national form of regulation, seemed incapable of resolving the combination of stagnation and rising inflation (Holland 2008), making it vulnerable to attacks from neo-liberal demands to reduce State activity, taxation and regulation, thus releasing the increasingly international aspirations of capital. What developed during this period was a much more fundamental political or ‘organic’ crisis (Gramsci 1971) in which the very values of post-war social democracy and welfarism were challenged. In Gramscian terms an organic crisis represents a particular historical juncture in which the balance of class forces is fundamentally realigned. Existing alliances fracture and collapse, whilst new alliances develop and form to assert leadership and direction (Hall 1987). In the 1970s this can be identified as the period in which post-war social democracy, and the settlement between capital and labour that underpinned it, came under significant and sustained challenge. At this point the ‘New Right’, spearheaded by Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK, emerged to impose its hegemonic leadership on a new world order. This new settlement was not restricted to the advanced capitalist economies, but through the increasing authority of supra-national institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, impacted in different ways on all economies, at whatever stage of development. Only by recognising the trajectory of globalisation through this period is it possible to understand the specific ways that economic and political crises impacted on national contexts to influence the shaping and re-shaping of welfare states.

These crises challenged the principles that had informed post-war social policy across the advanced capitalist economies (including the US), reversing working-class welfare gains that had been achieved at both company and State level. The triumph of the New Right at this time depended to a substantial degree on the ability of those involved to knit together a diverse but formidable alliance in support of State restructuring and most specifically its welfare function. Apple (2006a) has characterized this alliance in the US as one of ‘conservative modernization’, bringing together neo-liberals, neo-conservatives, the ‘religious right’ and ‘new managerialists’ in a ‘tense coalition’ (2006a: 49) that has significant, and sometimes contradictory differences, but which is united by a commitment to challenge the principles of welfarism, defined broadly as a commitment to redistributive fiscal policies, public provision of welfare services and access to services based on principles of universalism. Conservative modernizers have sought to restructure the State so that it reinforces, rather than mitigates, the impact of the market on the lives of citizens. The dominance of neo-liberal ideas in the conservative modernizers’ alliance has placed considerable emphasis on ‘rolling back the frontiers of the State’, and attacking so-called ‘big government’— a process Jessop (2002) has referred to as ‘destatization’. The consequent organisational changes in the form of the State have led to the State being variously described as the Enabling State (Gilbert and Gilbert 1989), the Contractual State (Harden 1992), and the Neo-Schumpterian Workfare State (Jessop 1994), all of which, with varying degrees of transparency, acknowledge neo-liberalism’s core commitment to consummate free market solutions—opposition to progressive taxation, reduced public spending, deregulation and privatization. Within the conservative modernizers’ alliance presented by Apple, the group labelled ‘new managerialists’ stand apart. This is a group that Apple implies may not be ideologically committed to the goals of conservative modernization, but, at a pragmatic and opportunistic level, they have aligned themselves with the agenda. As a new order has emerged in State and public services, the alignment provides those who have embraced it with a means of furthering careers and personal aspirations. In so doing, this group plays a key role in the consolidation of the conservative modernisation agenda by making the reforms ‘work’.

Within education the global consequences of neo-liberal domination have resulted in national policy agendas that reflect national differences, but which feature many striking similarities. A key feature of the neo-liberal restructuring of national education systems has been an emphasis on ‘efficiency’, ‘value for money’, ‘competition’ and ‘choice’. Outputs, often measured by student test scores in standardised tests, not only need to be maximised, but brought into alignment with the requirements of capital. The consequence has been a shift towards much more utilitarian and functional curricula, combined with an increasing emphasis on the measurement and ‘benchmarking’ of performance—without which educational ‘output’ cannot be quantified. At the same time market forces are increasingly introduced as a disciplinary mechanism, either directly through privatization or indirectly through the use of quasi-markets. The intention is not only to curb costs but also to limit teachers’ professional autonomy and the capacity of teachers to exert significant influence on the content and shape of the curriculum. Where free markets are unable to secure the desired outcomes, increasingly powerful inspectorates, reinforced by a phalanx of sanctions to penalise ‘poor performers’, provide regulation. This is illustrated by the identification of so-called ‘National Challenge’ schools in England (DCSF 2008a), or in the US, the designation of failure to make ‘adequate yearly progress’ under the No Child Left Behind legislation (US Department of Education 2008). (For a powerful critique of NCLB see Meier and Wood, 2004.)

All of these factors taken together highlight the need to develop a much more critical analysis of the drive to improve ‘standards’. The focus on improving standards (and the associated denigration of past achievements) is often at the centre of education policy discourse. However, the apparently uncritical focus on ‘effectiveness’ masks much more profound political issues. The emphasis on ‘standards’ de-politicises a discourse which is about what is taught, what counts as ‘real knowledge’ and who decides. These are not neutral issues (Apple 2003), but raise fundamental questions about the nature and purposes of education. In this context, the focus on standards is not a debate about the effectiveness of education, but shorthand for a particular type of education. In this sense the conservative modernisers’ emphasis on quantifying educational output (‘standards’) cannot be disentangled from the conservative modernisers’ aspirations for education to be more functional for capital—they are one and the same.

The chapter thus far provides only a broad-brush sketch of the educational landscapes in a global context. There are inevitably appreciable differences according to national circumstances and it is vital that educational research recognises and reflects these. Nevertheless, the drive for ‘standards’ as reflected in the use of standardized tests, increasing centralized control of curricula, the use of (quasi) market mechanisms and privatisation and the increased emphasis on ‘accountability’ reinforced by inspectorates and associated sanctions are increasingly the dominant features of educational reform in many countries. Across the world, in a very diverse range of national and regional contexts, the broad features of education policy described earlier are widespread (Robertson 2008).

Whilst caution is necessary when treating broad trends as universal experiences, it is also important to recognise that the alliances that promote the ‘conservative modernisation’ of education are not static, but rather like tectonic plates, they move and shift. Sometimes they appear settled, but at others times they are uneven and disturbed. We would not want to suggest, for example, that the transition from a Conservative to a Labour Government in the UK in 1997 did not represent a significant and meaningful shift in important areas of policy. Rather New Labour represented a re-orientation of the conservative modernizers’ alliance in which concerns about equity issues and the need for State intervention to develop human capital were acknowledged. However, addressing these issues within a fundamentally neo-liberal framework begins to generate new tensions and contradictions. For example, the inability of the relatively high cost economies of the advanced capitalist nations to compete with much lower cost economies elsewhere has resulted in increasing emphasis on the development of human capital as a means of competitive advantage. Within human capital theory (Becker 1964, Denison 1967, Schultz 1981) education policy is elevated to economic policy, as investment in skills through education is seen as the key to competitiveness in a globalised market. This investment in skills may suggest an expansion of public education, but at the same time the neoliberal State points to the control of public expenditure and a commitment to the small State.

Trying to reconcile this apparent contradiction disturbs the alliances that previously underpinned policy and opens up the possibilities for new directions in education reform. Moreover, such a contradiction impacts directly on teachers and their experience of work. Teachers are caught in a vice ...