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1 – 10 of 71The prevalence and drawbacks of policy borrowing in teacher education are widely acknowledged. In England, there has been extensive use of research conducted in the United States…
Abstract
The prevalence and drawbacks of policy borrowing in teacher education are widely acknowledged. In England, there has been extensive use of research conducted in the United States as justification for a prescriptive approach to teacher education nationwide. This raises questions about evidence borrowing from different contexts as a key facet of policy making, with inherent concerns about how the contextual influences on that research influence its effectiveness in transitioning to new spaces. Through the use of spatial theory, this chapter examines this phenomenon and highlights how inferences made from research undertaken in one context, but applied in another, can be detrimental to the established practices and expertise of teacher educators.
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England is a clear example of a country where government has imposed a stranglehold over curriculum development over the last 30 years, driven by a belief in the power of markets…
Abstract
England is a clear example of a country where government has imposed a stranglehold over curriculum development over the last 30 years, driven by a belief in the power of markets and testing to improve education. We provide an account of the evolution of a national curriculum in England, along with the growing importance of the school inspection system, which has served as a form of surveillance and as a constraint on curriculum development in schools, resulting in a very subject dominated curriculum. This has been exacerbated by demise of many traditional meso level curriculum actors and the emergence of a different assemblage of support. We give particular attention to the prominence given to interventions in pedagogy and curriculum, set within a school effectiveness paradigm. We explain that within government rhetoric there is encouragement to innovate but we show through research evidence that accountability pressures overwhelm this message and that younger teachers have not been introduced to or trained in curriculum development processes. In the final section of the chapter, we describe some schools which are going against the grain and innovating, but they do stand very much as oases in a curriculum desert.
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Elesa Zehndorfer and Chris Mackintosh
This paper analyses the radical reorganisation of English school sport by the coalition government, a move that led to the emergence of a significant discourse of dissatisfaction…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper analyses the radical reorganisation of English school sport by the coalition government, a move that led to the emergence of a significant discourse of dissatisfaction amongst school sport advocacy coalition groups.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper utilises Sabatier’s (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1999) Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to identify how the coalition government’s decision to abolish the successful Physical Education School Sport and Club Links (PESSCL) programme has specifically weakened the power of formerly influential advocacy coalitions within the school sport arena. Weber’s (1947) conceptualisation of charisma, in particular, the concept of charismatic rhetoric, is used to explain how these historically extensive policy changes were communicated by the coalition government, and particularly, by Michael Gove, the Secretary of State.
Findings
Locating the government’s rhetoric within the charismatic literature allowed the exploration of how a disempowerment of advocacy coalition groups and centralisation of power towards the state might have been partly achieved via the use of charismatic rhetoric (Weber, 1947).
Originality/value
Javidan and Waldman (2003) identified a lack of rigorous empirical study of the role of charismatic leadership and its consequences in public sector leadership, a critique that has been addressed by this paper.
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Martin Upchurch, Phoebe Moore and Aylin Kunter
This chapter reviews the ongoing processes of marketisation in secondary school teaching and its further embedment through commodification of teachers’ performance. We track…
Abstract
This chapter reviews the ongoing processes of marketisation in secondary school teaching and its further embedment through commodification of teachers’ performance. We track developments through documentary evidence from Government statements and other agency reports and unstructured interviews with teachers’ union representatives in the South West of England. Following Carter and Stevenson (2012) we begin by introducing the labour process debate concerning teachers’ productive labour to provide the backdrop for the argument that teachers’ work is increasingly commodified and judged along neoliberalised requirements. Commodification has taken place through measurement of abstract standards constructed by associating individual teachers with their pupils’ achievements, as well as subjective assessment of teacher behaviour judged against newly introduced ‘Teacher Standards’. We argue that this attempted quantification of teacher output is constructed, in Marxist terms, to accommodate to the ‘socially necessary labour time’ and to indirectly maximise work ‘output’ for individual teachers through a process of standardisation of processes involved in task completion. We attempt to define new ways of measuring teachers’ work through the lens of abstract labour and link such processes to workplace alienation. In such fashion, teachers are subject to work intensification, increased monitoring and surveillance, further standardisation of work and weakening of creative autonomy leading to intensified alienation from the professional nature of the job.
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Inequalities in English schools stem from numerous factors be they educational, social or economic. Thatcherite policies reshaped the education agenda in the 1980s and…
Abstract
Inequalities in English schools stem from numerous factors be they educational, social or economic. Thatcherite policies reshaped the education agenda in the 1980s and inequalities were ignored by successive governments until 1997 when New Labour included social objectives in its approach with measures, such as Education Action Zones and Excellence in Cities. The following Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition and Conservative governments of David Cameron maintained such objectives through the Pupil Premium and the Universal Infant Free School Meals scheme. Theresa May’s government seems to have adopted a different policy since July 2016, focusing on meritocracy. Methodological obstacles are inherent to studies on the evolution of inequalities at school level and it may be argued that successive Cabinets since 1997 have not implemented structural reforms designed to tackle economic inequalities, thus limiting the effect of their educational reforms.
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