A Cross-Cultural Consideration of Teacher Leaders' Narratives of Power, Agency and School Culture

England, Jamaica and the United States

Eleanor J. Blair, Carmel Roofe, Susan Timmins

• Publisher: Myers Education Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781975501600
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación superior

A 2021 SPE Outstanding Book Award Winner Studies of teacher leadership have proliferated over the past fifty years. Earlier work tended to focus exclusively on the link between teacher leadership and school improvement. Now, however, cross-cultural research on the relationship between teacher leadership and power, agency and school culture has the potential to contribute to a deeper understanding of the teaching profession in diverse geographical and social contexts. A Cross-Cultural Consideration of Teacher Leaders' Narratives of Power, Agency and School Culture presents groundbreaking work that expands discussions of teachers' work to highlight the struggles of a profession in three different countries: England, Jamaica and the United States. This research provides examples of teacher leaders' narratives about power, agency and school culture, presenting the voices of teacher leaders across diverse contexts. It identifies the "lessons" that transcend culture and speaks to the importance of understanding how teachers' work (and teacher leadership) functions within complex school cultures. This work has profound implications for teaching, learning and leading in a 21st century global economy. Perfect for courses such as:
Teacher Leadership | Educational Leadership and Management | Teaching and Teaching Methods | Action Research/Applied Research

CHAPTER ONE

Education in England

SUSAN TIMMINS

Introduction

THE EDUCATION SYSTEM IN England continues to face many challenges. Inadequate funding and resources, high staff turnover, teacher burnout, and a recruitment crisis are just a few areas highlighted by the National Education Union (NEU) and the Department for Education (DfE). There are a number of events happening in England currently which are impacting the effectiveness of whole school leadership; for example, the ‘creation of educational markets’, with ‘high stakes accountability’ through standards based testing, and monitoring of schools through inspections (Miller, 2016, p. 9). Increasingly, the government maintains control through punitive measures such as compulsory testing, targets, surveillance, and monitoring (Miller, 2016). All schools in England are held accountable and are regulated by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (OFSTED). They inspect all services that provide education and skills for learners of all ages. OFSTED’s role is to make sure that organizations who provide education, training, and care services do so to a high standard for children and students. Schools are inspected on average every three years and following an inspection are awarded an overall grade from the following scale: Grade 1: Outstanding, Grade 2: Good, Grade 3: Requires improvement, and Grade 4: Inadequate. OFSTED makes judgements across the following areas: effectiveness of leadership and management; quality of teaching, learning, and assessment; personal development, behavior, and welfare; and outcomes for pupils (OFSTED, 2018). As you can imagine, anything less than good or outstanding puts immense pressure on schools to improve.

Types of Schools in England

There are increasing numbers of different types of schools in England; the majority are either an academy or a maintained school. They differ in the way funding is allocated to the school and which organisation oversees them. Funding and oversight for maintained schools are provided by the local authority and most are classified as community schools, which means that the local authority employ the school’s staff and are responsible for student admissions. Maintained schools in England are legally required to follow the statutory national curriculum, which sets out the programmes of study and the specific subject content for each subject that should be taught to all pupils.

Academies receive their funding and are overseen by the Department for Education (DfE) via the Education and Skills Funding Agency. They are also run by an academy trust which employs the staff. Academies do not have to follow the National Curriculum but are required to deliver a ‘broad and balanced’ curriculum which includes English, mathematics, science, and religious education. Children in academies have to sit for national tests, so for this reason, many academies do choose to follow the national curriculum.

Two types of academies have evolved; a convertor academy (those deemed by OFSTED to be performing well that have converted to academy status) and sponsored academies (in the main, underperforming schools changing to academy status and run by sponsors). On comparison of the most recent OFSTED grades, convertor academies are most likely to be good or outstanding while sponsored academies are more likely than maintained schools to be graded, require improvement or are inadequate. This is not surprising, as convertors were high performing to start with and sponsored low performing, hence the prompted move to academy status to support school improvement. Many academies are part of an academy chain or multi-academy trust, which means that they can benefit from economies of scale for services and resources that they need, and therefore more money can be spent per pupil. The government appears to be more in favour of academies and hold the view that they drive up standards and hold the belief that schools converting to academy status sets them free from the bureaucracy of the local authorities (Rosen, 2016).

Critics of academies Lucy Powell (2016), a former shadow education secretary, and Kevin Courtney, deputy general secretary for the National Union of Teachers (NUT), claim that academy status does not result in higher attainment or in fact lead to school improvement. Furthermore, they suggest that many academies are in fact failing their pupils, particularly their disadvantaged pupils. OFSTED claims that whilst there can be clear benefits to becoming an academy, there is little difference performance-wise between academies and those schools maintained by local authorities (2016).

The diversity of England’s school system continues to grow, and irrespective of whether a school is an academy or a maintained school, the quality of the school is contingent on attracting and retaining the best teachers and leaders. During inspections in 2014, OFSTED highlighted that leadership was not good enough at a staggering 3,500 schools, and of those, a disproportionately high number of secondary schools were identified where leadership was judged to be inadequate or required improvement.

The State of Education

According to Monteiro (2015), ‘There have been a range of international and national reports and studies proclaiming that the overall status of the teaching profession is not very prestigious’ and refers to ‘decline’ and ‘lack of recognition’ as two terms frequently associated to the status of the teaching profession worldwide (p. 61). In 1997 a report compiled jointly by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Committee of Experts observed that in virtually every country reported upon, the status of teachers when compared with other professions was low or, in some instances, had actually deteriorated in recent years. Fast forward to 2019 and the picture is not much improved in England, with teacher remuneration and status comparing unfavourably with other professions, fewer entrants to the profession, and retention of teachers at an all-time low. According to the National Foundation for Educational Research (Worth and Van den Brande, 2019), the number of working-age teachers leaving the profession has increased from 25,000 in 2010–11 to 36,000 in 2016–17. They found that whilst 85% of early career teachers remained in the profession at the end of their first year, the three-year retention rate dropped from 80% to 73% in 2017. What is worse, the five-year retention rate has dropped from 73% in 2011 to 67% in 2017.

The National Education Union (NEU) (2019) criticized the government for being slow to respond to the teacher recruitment and retention crisis and further maintain that the situation is worsening:

Work life balance is worse than a year ago, and the linked issues of workload and accountability are the main reasons education professionals don’t see themselves working in the sector in the near future. (p. 1)

The NEU gathered views from 8,000 teachers, school leaders, and support staff from across the United Kingdom (UK) on the State of Education and the conditions they have to work under. Regrettably, 40% of the respondents foresee that they will no longer be working in education by 2024, and a staggering 18% expect to be gone within two years. What appears to be emerging, and should be a major concern to government, is the declining retention rate of recently qualified teachers. The same survey found similar alarming results:

•Twenty-six percent of those with between 2–5 years’ experience intend to leave education in the next five years.

•For those with less than 2 years’ experience, this drops to a still significant 15%.

Workload and accountability were the main reasons offered for why teachers would choose to leave the profession.

‘My job is no longer about children. It’s just a 60-hour week with pressure to push children’s achievement data through’. (p. 1)

‘Exhausted and fed up with the hours I have to maintain in order to keep abreast of paperwork demands. I love the teaching but have grown tired of how relentless the job has become’. (p. 1)

Many staff surveyed raised the issues of being micro-managed, and when asked how their job could be improved, they responded:

‘To be trusted more as a professional and scrutinised less. The amount of monitoring in our school is excessive’. (p. 1)

The NEU report stated that teachers felt that the workload in schools would not diminish until the accountability regime is relinquished and schools become more balanced and more focused on teaching and supporting children, rather than committing valuable resources towards damaging factors such as teaching to the test, focusing on tasks, paperwork, and data analysis for inspectors.

In an attempt to resolve the teacher retention and recruitment crisis in England, the Department for Education (DfE) launched a new strategy in January 2019 which seeks to attract more people to the profession and encourage those who are in the classroom to stay. The main focus of the strategy is on early career support, flexible hours, reducing workload, and simplifying the process of application to teacher training programs. The most substantial change could be through the creation of an Early Career Framework (ECF), which guarantees a 5% reduction in teaching load during the second year of teaching. Presently, newly qualified teachers get 10% reduction in the first year and no reduction in the second year. In addition, they are committed to ensuring that teachers have access to curriculum and training materials, and funding for mentors to support early career teachers (Department for Education, 2019). It could be argued that this is a step in the right direction compared to existing strategies such as teacher bursaries, more familiarly known in the United States as scholarships. Bursaries are designed to attract teachers to the profession; however, focusing on financial incentives can often attract individuals who are not really dedicated to becoming teachers and have no real desire to do it in the long term. They can often view the training year as a year out of their normal profession, or a ‘filling-in’ year before they go on to do what they really want to do. As a teacher educator, I have witnessed this on a number of occasions whereby trainees have received a £26,000 tax free bursary whilst they are training to be a teacher and then after a year, they decide against becoming a teacher. Sometimes, after completing their training, they return to their previous jobs or go on to do something else. Whilst this is particularly frustrating on my part as a teacher educator, it is even more so felt by the school mentors who have dedicated so much time, effort, and support to help develop the trainees’ teaching practices and enable them to qualify as secondary school teachers.

The Department for Education (DfE) has done very little to raise the profile of the teaching profession. Their strategy has been heavily focused around recruiting newcomers to the profession rather than retaining valuable teachers who are already in the profession. The recent focus on reducing workload, developing formal leadership roles, and renewing emphasis on health and well-being for teachers can be seen as an attempt to persuade teachers to remain or persuade others to join. However, they have not given sufficient thought as to how as a society, we build respect for teachers as professionals and convey trust that they will do a good job of educating children.

Giving teachers’ responsibility as professionals and leaders of reform, and trusting their professional responsibility, is the greatest challenge to reform. (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2011, p. 5)

However, many would argue that increased government intervention is fast becoming counter-productive. Bassey (2005) asserts that whenever there is a change in political party, ministers are keen to introduce their new ‘pet scheme’ and draw up new league tables and curriculums and tests. Bassey goes on to say:

It is time to stop: day by day it is teachers who know best what their pupils need. It is time for government to trust teachers and to transfer to them the power to exercise that trust in the best interest of the pupils and parents whom they serve. (p. 7)

The government is also keen to promote every teacher as a researcher, and whilst I agree that educational research is the most durable way of ensuring high-quality learning and teaching, the government has not removed any existing pressures for teachers such as inspections, targets, external tests, or league tables. All of which are tasks that reduce the time, energy, and courage teachers need to participate in research and scholarship work. It is only when these burdens have disappeared or have been adjusted that research will have a much greater role in teachers’ work.

Embracing and utilizing the skills of teacher leaders within our schools is an important step forward that is prerequisite to steering us through these challenges. Teacher leaders exist within our school organisations, and tapping into this important resource is an absolute must! Valuing this potential and placing trust in these professionals can capture teacher leaders’ abilities and potential and positively impact whole school improvement that benefits all students.

Teacher Leadership

Effective leadership is commonly accepted as being an essential component in acquiring and sustaining school improvement. Indications from the school improvement literature repeatedly highlight how effective leaders can employ an indirect power and influence on a school’s ability to improve as a school organisation and improve outcomes for students (Earley et al., 2012). Whilst it is recognized that senior managers can be the main influencers, it is accepted that the power of middle level leaders and teachers can also be a key asset. Harris (2004), Leithwood and Riehl (2003) describe how teacher leaders ‘rally round’ and work with others towards shared goals. In fact, much of the evidence advocates that teacher leadership is greatest in collaborative settings and where there is a culture of trust (Caine, 2000; Little, 2000). This aligns with Gronn’s (2000) conception of leadership as ‘fluid and emergent’ rather than ‘fixed’ and which has greatest effect when it is a shared activity (p. 333) Whilst Muijs and Harris (2006) would confer that collaboration is necessary for teacher leadership, they extend the discourse on teach...